Kookmin University (President Jung Seung-ryul) collaborated with the HUSS Global Symbiosis Consortium (Kwangwoon University, Kookmin University, Sun Moon University, Yeungnam University, and Honam University) and the Tashkent University of Information Technologies (TUIT) in Uzbekistan to successfully host a global cooperation program in Uzbekistan from January 8 to January 15 with the aim of promoting international exchange and solving sustainable social and environmental problems.

The program consisted of various activities, including visits to the TUIT main campus and Nurafshan branch campus, visits to related organizations, and the implementation of collaborative projects between the Global Symbiosis Consortium and TUIT. In particular, the project used the design thinking methodology to carry out the entire process of empathy-problem definition-ideation-prototyping, focusing on the theme of “developing sustainability solutions through global symbiosis.” This gave the participants an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the needs of people and communities and to reflect on the results of their learning.

Fifty students from five universities affiliated with the Global Symbiosis Consortium were assigned one from each university to form ten teams, participated in a special lecture on “Understanding Global Symbiosis,” and took a “Design Thinking Course” produced by Professor Park Do-hyung of the Kookmin University Customer Experience Research Lab before participating in the local program. In Uzbekistan, we worked with TUIT students to conduct interviews and surveys to research the data needed for the project, analyze the data, and create a planning proposal and report based on the data.

In this project, the gold prize was awarded to the ZG team (Jung Yun-seo of Kwangwoon University, Min-jung Choi of Kookmin University, Bo-kwon Hwang of Sun Moon University, Soo-min Lee of Yeungnam University, So-jung Park of Honam University, and Saidkamol of TUIT), which designed a system that reduces food waste and efficiently utilizes leftover food according to the local conditions in Uzbekistan. The platform proposed by Team ZG is a government-led, state-owned system designed to efficiently collect and redistribute leftover bread that is not consumed in Uzbekistan, where bread is a staple food. It was highly praised for its focus on solving specific problems in the local community and for its ability to reduce food waste in a sustainable way and create social value.

Byoung Joon Kim, head of the Global Coexistence Project at Kookmin University, who organized the program, said that he hopes that the program was a valuable opportunity for the participants to experience the importance of a global mindset and to cooperate to solve sustainable social and environmental problems, as the Icelandic proverb “Only those who have traveled many places are wise” says. He expressed his hope that the wisdom gained through such diverse experiences and perspectives would become an essential asset for us living in the global era, and that it would be a meaningful time for us to accumulate such wisdom and practice the value of global coexistence.

Meanwhile, the HUSS Global Symbiotic Consortium has been operated in cooperation with several universities, including Kwangwoon University, Kookmin University, Sun Moon University, Yeungnam University, and Honam University, with a total of 9 billion won in support from the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation for three years starting in 2024. The consortium has been working hard to contribute to global symbiosis with the goal of training 2,500 core convergence talents with sustainable resource responsiveness, sustainable industrial understanding, and sustainable international community inclusiveness.