The following post was written by Vice President and Director of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo for the Designmatters blog.

Art Center’s fall term started for us on the heels of an extraordinary week in Shanghai. Highlights included the opportunity to experience first hand the pageantry and wondrous scale of the 2010 World Expo; a spectacular day at TEDx Shanghai at the invitation of local curator extraordinaire Richard Hsu in which the theme that characterizes this city—fusion—was explored in myriad stimulating ways, meetings at the offices of Continuum and Frog, a window into a bygone China with a visit to the ancient city of Xitang, dinner with local alumni Marcus Lui and Clement Yip, and the presentation of the Safe Agua project at the Expo’s UN Pavilion and at Tongji University in the context of the educational Cumulus Conference Young Creators for Better City, Better Life.

Seeing through educational collaborations that go from the classroom into the world falls squarely within the Designmatters mandate, but even by our exacting standards of “tangible” outcomes, Safe Agua stands in a league of its own given the accelerated curve of implementation of some the solutions proposed by our students, and the depth of ongoing engagement we have with our partners at the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para mi Pais in Santiago and with the communities we are working with.

Shanghai was a global stage that allowed us to showcase the depth of all of the projects components with the Safe Agua exhibition and be there together with the exhibition’s lead team (David Mocarski, Penny Herscovitich, Daniel Gottlieb, K C Cho, Stephanie Stalker, Snow Dong and Ramon Coronado) and two of our partners from Un Techo, Andres Iriondo and Ignacio Gonzalez, to partake in the kudos from peer institutions worldwide.

We are now preparing to share the exhibition with our community at Art Center next spring. Around the same time, the project’s publication Safe Agua, will be hitting bookstores throughout the country, courtesy of DAP. Much to look forward to indeed!