Designing innovative solutions to engage youths in sustainable urban planning, part I: Presenting the challenge!
The voices of young people are some of the strongest in the current climate debate. This is not least noticeable through initiatives such as the School strike for the climate (Skolstrejk för klimatet in Swedish) and Greta Thunberg’s vast impact. Children and young people all over the world are worried about their future and they demand more to be done to save our climate. However, their opinions and experiences are not heard in the building of a sustainable society, nor in the planning of greener and more sustainable cities. Based on this, we gave a group of students at the bachelor programme IT, media and design at Södertörn University an assignment for the course Design, Innovation and Creativity during the fall semester in 2020.
The assignments were to think about how to design innovative solutions to meet a number of challenges related to young people’s opportunities to participate in the development of sustainable living environments by making use of their voices in a meaningful way. By using creative design methods, the students were, more specifically, challenged to find innovative design solutions that make it possible to capture the voices of children and young people. This within the framework of sustainable urban planning and in the creation of attractive and sustainable living environments.
Some of the challenge areas and questions that the students were presented to were:
· How can youth’s voices be raised in urban planning processes to support climate work and at the same time create attractive environments for children and young people?
· How can youths be involved in urban planning by using methods and practices from areas such as art, architecture, design, technology and digital games?
· How can the opportunities of technology be used to create participation and enable youths to make an impact in urban planning for sustainable living environments?
· How can you stimulate, encourage and increase various forms of local participation and co-creation together with youths through, for example, citizen dialogue, security work information, consultation, cooperation, and co-decision making?
Design, innovation and creativity
The assignment was given to the students within a course called Design, innovation and creativity. In the first part of this course the student gets to work and learn more about design methods and creative processes used within the field of design and development. The first part of the course focuses on providing the students with a battery of design methods that they can handle and use in their design practice. They learn methods from Design Thinking but also methods for user experience design and for stimulating creativity and to use when working with creative practices and processes. During this part of the course the students also are provided with societal challenge that that take on as a recourse for learning these methods, and here the assignment given to the students comes in.
During a five-week period in the beginning of the fall semester the students were working with the given assignment as a resource both for learning design methods and how to work with creative processes within innovation and design, and as a project aiming to developing interesting insights that could result in innovative solutions on how to engage youth in sustainable urban planning.
Design Thinking
When working with challenges aiming to design innovative solutions, the use of Design Thinking is prominent. Design thinking is a process for creative problem solving with a human-centered core. The human-centered approach to innovation means that innovation is anchored in the understanding of customer’s needs, the work with rapid prototyping to generate creative ideas that will transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organisations. By using Design Thinking, you make decisions based on what customers really want instead of relying only on historical data or making risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence. Design thinking brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It has become influential also based on the fact that it allows those who are not trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges. The process starts with taking-action and understanding the right questions and challenges that human and users face in the specific situations. It is also about embracing simple mindset shifts and tackling problems from a new direction. Read more here.
During the five-week course that the students were engaged in when working with this challenge of engaging youth in sustainable urban planning, they also learnt the Design Thinking approach, methods and mindset to be able to create innovative solutions on the challenge promoted. They also applied the human-centered approach by talking to the local youth in Huddinge municipality to learn about their need and gain insights that helped the students to deliver solutions based on those insights on the youth’s local needs.
Co-design and collaborating institutions
The task that the students worked with was designed in collaboration with the research project Planning with Youths, but also with Huddinge municipality and the Coordination Agency Huddinge Botkyrka and Salem (Samordningsförbundet Huddinge Botkyrka Salem in Swedish). The Coordination Agency is owned and financed by the (Swedish) Employment Service, the Social Insurance Office, the County Council and the Municipalities of Botkyrka, Huddinge and Salem. The aim of the Coordination Agency is to finance and support different forms of joint rehabilitation activities, preventive actions and knowledge-enhancing efforts in order to prevent or shorten sick leave as well as unemployment amongst people with coordinated needs. In both the municipality and the Coordination Agency the work of capture the voices of children and young people within urban and spatial planning, as well as in the creation of attractive and sustainable living environments is an ongoing project. Specifically, the Coordination Agency was during the autumn 2020 focusing on a project together with Huddinge municipality with the aim of developing collaboration around young adults who neither work, nor studies, by examining their needs and which development areas that could exist for the target group. The project investigated and provided proposals on how the Coordinating Agency could support the need for coordinated efforts and individualised support for young adults who are in or risk of ending up in long-term unemployment and who’s needs are not met at the present. This was be done by mapping the target group’s needs and existing efforts.
The goal was to find forms for a youth initiative in Huddinge and map the target group’s scope and needs to compile appropriate methods for reaching young people within target group, and pass them on to work or study-oriented activities. But also, to investigate how the support for youth in Huddinge is best organised with support from the Coordination Agency. Questions central to the project in Huddinge municipality included the following:
· How can you increase young people’s self-confidence to get to work or study?
· How can you get young “home sitters” to engage in daily activities, to potentially move on to a sustainable future?
· How to get rid of the feeling that young people are “stuck” in their area, and open up their views — create bigger dreams.
These questions and the project described above, was presented for the students as an inspiration for the assignment on how to engage youths in sustainable urban planning by the representatives Sofia Ahlström and Ibrahim Obsiye from Huddinge municipality and the Coordination Agency. Sofia and Ibrahim also meet the student groups separately during the project work, and gave the student feedback when they presented their ideas after the five weeks of working with the challenge.
In the next post I will share the results of the challenge and the students work!
