Projects

36 Kaospilots students travelled 9000 km east to spend three months in Shanghai, China. It’s a story many by now have heard. But – what do they do?
We have tried to put together a picture of what it is we’re actually doing in Shanghai.

As with everything else at the Kaospilots – it’s all about having a client, having a project, having a goal, fulfilling a need. Team 14 is working on four different projects.

In the coming days we’re going to present the work, process and thoughts of the four project groups.



It’s the 26.th of March, 2009. We’re two weeks into the project, and we have realized that there is no client, no partner and no budget.
What does this mean to a group of coming project and process leaders?

When the six of us first got together, we were motivated to work with a real Chinese company that apparently had a wish to work with us. This Chinese company is called Sohu and is China’s largest, fastest, coolest, (fill out the blanks) __est, ___est online community. One of their flagship projects is that they were the official sponsor of the Beijing Olympics. As we had learned in the assignment from the school, Sohu wanted us to facilitate workshops and courses for their users, where we would share our knowledge within creative project, process and business design. Wow! What a project - we thought.

After our initial meeting at the “bling-bling” Sohu headquarters, we understood that Sohu wasn’t really a client. Not really a partner either. And they couldn’t really support this project financially at all. What they wanted to do was to write about whatever we did on their home page.

This of course drained our group of energy and motivation. So what to do? Instead of just giving up, we focused on what had brought us together in the first place; curiosity towards creative entrepreneurs in Shanghai and willingness to do something together with this target group. Based on this, we re-formulated our project and Eleonor, being out project leader, planned out a number of phases.

We are now in the Discovery phase, where we individually or in small groups go out in Shanghai to find those creative entrepreneurs and see what they can bring us. In the next phase, we will share what we have discovered and see what project we can formulate out of that. With or without Sohu.

This is a very challenging exercise in staying in the unknown, working without knowing the next steps and being totally on your own, in relation to motivating yourself. There is no deadlines, no meetings, no frames – you have to create everything from scratch. It is tough to work under these conditions, it takes a lot of energy to pull your self up, and try to create something out of nothing. Hopefully the learning will be worth it, though hard earned.