Winter School

Winter School is a two-part international and cross-cultural experience aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students. Organized by the GSA’s School of Innovation and Technology, each year guest institutions from around the world are invited to participate. The event brings together students, professors, and professionals of design, engineering, computer science and social sciences, giving them the opportunity to work together, and to explore a contemporary challenge through an online week and an intensive and site-specific experience at the GSA’s Highlands & Islands campus on the Altyre Estate in Forres.

Radical Stewardship
Designing the Landscape of Care

The 10th edition of Winter School aimed to give voice to, and serve, the landscape, to engage with the emerging forms of environmental care and stewardship, to rethink and reframe the rights and responsibilities related to human interactions with the environment, and to suggest new ways to plan, iterate, and promote meaningful transformations. This positioning merged the estate, as the site of physical experience, with the hyper connected essence of our daily life, mediated by digital technologies. The workshop involved a direct engagement with seven local stakeholders, ranging from technology to food, from energy to nature restoration, and human and more-than-human entities, with whom students developed design artifacts, systems, and experiences which questioned, reflected, and opened potential threads to re-imagine how we might live.