Video: learning to design for the displaced
We taught students video prototyping methods to help integrate refugees into new communities
I was invited to the University of Antwerp in Belgium to facilitate a week-long workshop focused on the theme of displacement. From a very broad topic, we decided to focus on refugees and their integration into new communities.
The participating students were from a broad range of design disciplines, such as product design, interior architecture and architecture. The purpose of the course was to learn how to design services. I believe there were two main reasons why the workshop was a success.
First, we worked with video prototyping, which forced the students to create something tangible fast. Through video, they could “create” the things they didn’t know how to build. They might not have known how to make a real, working hologram, but they could imagine it, and the video allowed them to communicate and test the idea. Working under pressure, the students learned to embrace the fail fast mentality.
Second, the teams were interdisciplinary and they changed every day. This generated a high energy and good group dynamic. The concepts they came up included tools to support socializing while using public transport, creating awareness via virtual reality and exploring a culture through food. They used different tools to visualize their ideas: animating Play-Doh and simple drawings, creating quick clickable prototypes and filming guerrilla tests in the streets capturing real people’s feedback.
Here is a lookback video to the workshop.
