INDEX: and AIGA Announce Programming Alliance

INDEX: and AIGA, the organisations behind the world's biggest design award and the world's most time-honoured design summit, have announced an alliance that will introduce a series of events between Aspen and Copenhagen over the coming years. The events will emphasise the potential of design to improve life for people around the world.

INDEX: and AIGA Aspen Design Summit have led the discussion of design's role in solving complex problems in Europe and North America. The new alliance allows both organisations to lift this agenda to a new international and strategic level that also includes a higher focus on actual results and outcomes of the events. The aim of their collaboration is to foster a multidisciplinary process on a truly global scale and to engage decision makers in design, business, non-governmental organizations and government.

Kick off in August
This will happen in a series of events through 2015, beginning in August 2007, where the conference program "Copenhagen Prelude to INDEX:/Aspen Summit 2008", is presented in Copenhagen in connection to the rest of the INDEX: 2007 events. Leading personalities within design and innovation world-wide will discuss and treat the most urgent challenges within the subjects of User Centred Design & Innovation and Design to Improve Life.

The debates and recommendations of the conference will then be passed on to AIGA Aspen Design Summit in January 2008. Over four days, the AIGA Aspen Design Summit will refine the potential approaches for solutions, identify necessary action steps and stakeholders, and will charge INDEX: and AIGA to begin advocating the active engagement of those elements of society and business who can actually implement the solutions.

Thrilled Design CEOs
CEO of INDEX:, Kigge Hvid, expects much of the new partnership: "We are proud and honored by the opportunity to form an alliance with Aspen Design Summit. From the start, and in the years to come, this partnership will be of inestimable importance to the world's understanding of the human and commercial potential in Design to Improve Life."

AIGA CEO Ric Grefe is equally thrilled: "Now INDEX: and AIGA will be able to reach even deeper into the communities concerned with improving the human condition, working together to bring creative minds to bear on problems the 21st century invites us to solve. The Aspen Design Summit has a legacy in bringing together great minds and intractable issues and now it is being reinvigorated as a force for productive change."

AIGA: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/815.html
INDEX: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/9050.html

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