Identifying Social Issues, Framing Design Problems, and An Inspiring Start to Our Second Week at Karamat
We have reached the final week of our summer school at Karamat Husain Muslim Girls PG College in Lucknow, India!
In Georgiana‘s first class of the week, students were split into groups and asked to identify a social issue from which to develop an advocacy project plan. Each group had to draw a tree with roots (to represent the root causes of the issue), branches (representing the barriers to solving the issue) and leaves (representing the solutions for the issue). Students were also introduced to the “ecological model” of understanding social issues at individual, interpersonal, institutional, community and policy levels.
The class centred mostly on understanding the issue students had chosen to focus on. Those included women’s lack of access to education, rape crisis, corruption and poor cleanliness in the city. The activity will continue tomorrow!
Students began the “ideation phase” for Kasia‘s design thinking course. In groups, they had to frame a problem as a design question, and then look at the social needs of the persona they designed the question for. Some of the needs students identified stemmed from problems such as pollution, starvation, discrimination, illiteracy, unemployment, and poverty. Based on the identified needs, each team began searching for ideas on how to solve them. To do this, they used techniques such as “brainstorming”, “brainwriting”, and “the worst idea”.
In addition, students practiced teamwork (listening and collaboration) and engaged the session with a game that aimed to show them the impact of different points of view. They also practiced public speaking and presentation skills.
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