During the policy week Isa and I set out to discover our study associations potential to be more involved with today’s topics in society. In this project plan we wanted to facilitate the opportunity for our members to understand their value as a designer in our society while making an impact. Together with 6 enthusiastic students we decided to explore the project plan along the topics of elections, education inequality and children’s aspirations.
Along the year we were still figuring out what the best form and way was to go about this. Societal topics deserve the right approach and that became evident. While we were orientating we came in contact with the municipality of Delft, where Agnes was so kind to introduce us to some awesome people who are also passionate about making our local society a better place. This is how we were also introduced to Pieke from the TU Delft who gave an inspiring presentation about local projects that have improved our local municipality.
With all this knowledge and people in mind, we quickly realised that our strength as an association lies in creating awareness around a topic. During this period Purple Friday came around and I was pretty bummed that there would be no people at the faculty to celebrate the day of inclusion. I decided to make ID a more inclusive space for when our lovely students are back in Kafee, by letting our faculty acknowledge that our two toilets do not follow a certain gender anymore. So it is just two toilets. Simpel toch!
Then came the Dutch elections, where we used our platform to promote to go vote and the workgroup wrote an article about voting which is pretty neat! After this period our focus quickly shifted towards our final event: the social design sprint!
Together with the workgroup we want over some possible topics for the social design sprint and landed on “how do you inspire children to reach for the stars”, which came out of the topic of education inequality. We then decided that we wanted to give a mini lunch lecture about social design as a whole and then dive in with the students who participated in the social design sprint. We came in contact with What Design Can Do who were going to give a guest lecture but sadly scheduling got in the way. We then decided to give the lecture about social design ourselves, the lecture about education inequality was given by Cecile Kwa (who also created the info folder below) and the lecture about pedagogy was given by Hugo van Bree who is a pedagogical science students who is doing his specialisation in Education at the Radboud University Nijmegen.
Together with the participants we started the social design sprint after the mini lecture. We used the ‘vraagstukvormer’ (issue explorer) which was developed by Social Design Showdown. After a day full of insightful ideas and work we were so happy with the results! This project plan truly was an amazing and educational (mooi) experience. And I hope that our curriculum allows us to explore more around the topic of social design.
Thank you Frida Gomez Poblette , Cecile Kwa, Marre van der Schee, Jort Huitink, Sanne van der Linden & Nina Touw for giving this project plan your enthusiasm and intelligence!
Kusjes groetjes liefs, Khalid El Haji en Isa Jorritsma