Youth Engagement
Youth by the Coast and Countryside: Designing Interventions in Underserved Costal and Rural UK Communities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laura Wareing
Young people living in coastal and rural communities around the United Kingdom face significant barriers to education and employment, severely limiting their chance to succeed and achieve their aspirations. This paper asks how place-based collaborative design projects can play a role in helping young people planning for their future when living and working in rural and seaside locations. It presents a case study from ongoing research in this area where a co-design process brought together a seaside based creative business, local school pupils and design PhD students to consider their hometown to redesign aspects of a major local arts and culture festival. The paper shares details of how the approach brought benefits to all the groups involved. The process engaged local young people; contributed to the sustainability of the festival; connected the young people with a local business, helped develop skills and contributed to innovative placemaking in the town. This research has implications for researchers and designers who wish to understand how design can support transformative action around issues such as education, employment prospects and underserved communities facing economic decline. This paper aims to be and sets out to be an advocate for the potential of design in context relatively under-explored in design research.
Mobilizing the Design Process for Economically Marginalized Youth at a Boys and Girls Club to Impact Self-efficacy and Self-advocacy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session William Nickley, Sebastien Proulx
Focusing on a study in which an after-school workshop series mobilized design process and emerging technology for economically marginalized youth, this study highlights how design and technology may impact participants’ self-efficacy and self-advocacy. Often underdeveloped in our service population, self-efficacy and self-advocacy have been shown to have a positive impact on secondary and post-secondary academic performance and outcomes for the service population. We developed a design-led after-school educational program in conjunction with Boys and Girls Clubs of Columbus (BGCC). BGCC is the local branch of a national nonprofit organization serving primarily economically marginalized youth by providing safe, educational, after-school environments. Through the program, youth participants learned design methods and emerging technologies, then proposed solutions to problems they identified in their community through imaginative and creative activities. This opportunity allowed BGCC youth to become familiar with a design thinking mindset as well as creative technologies, including a online reality (VR), to explore ways to transform their environment for the benefit of their community. Our aim was to assess if designerly ways support youth capacity of self-efficacy and self-advocacy. Pre- and post-program interviews with participants and organizers revealed effects on youth self-efficacy and self-advocacy, while an analysis of youth designed online objects revealed connections to youth identified issues facing their communities. Additionally, this paper discusses challenges and roadblocks encountered during the pilot program along with research opportunities to further investigate connections between design and social impact.
Toy Design: An Approach to Children Needs
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Azadeh Razzagh
Design with the help of children can certainly yield better results for designers. This study, first of all, aims to investigate the skills children possess as designers, considering that children’s innate skills are among the building blocks of design. The main objective of this study is to design toys for children with the help of children themselves. In this analytic and case study, children’s designs are analyzed, and 391 volunteer students, both male and female, from schools in northern and southern Tehran, have been asked to design a toy using designing tools (user as a designer). The data yielded by the experiment were analyzed in SPSSWIN17, and the results reveal that children, as consumers of design, can be trained to be “designers.” Moreover, in another hypothesis, children often design toys that are robotic and nowadays prefer to have more interaction with their toys. Children expect to receive a reaction to their thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, and this may be why they tend to design robotic tools which are ready to serve humans. Most children, more than designing a toy for themselves, are seeking a peer or playmate. When they want a toy, they are looking for a human in that toy. This human being is realized in the form of a toy robot.
