Designing for Wicked Problems
Democracy, Community & Alternative Futures
2.5h Virtual Workshops on Friday's
September 29th - October 27th, 2023
11:00am-1:30pm EST | 5:00pm-7:30pm CET / SAST
Overview
The Global Classroom for Democracy Innovation (GCDI) brings together students from multiple global locations in a real-time collaborative online forum for cross-cultural engagement and global learning, rooted in design thinking. The series is framed around practically engaging with the concepts of democracy, sustainability, and inclusion; and will ask you to explore your own positionality and locality as you develop a group project proposal to be showcased at the end of the course. Participants will be empowered to leverage what is learned in the classroom to address real-life issues.
Context
Wicked problems are so big that we cannot imagine addressing them alone. Challenges like climate change have no borders, and disproportionately affect the world’s most marginalized populations. We therefore align this workshop around Escobar’s (2018) call for future oriented, democratic, and justice-based planning frameworks. Design Thinking and Design Justice offer frameworks and principles for scalable, action-oriented collaboration and ideation, starting at the community level and requiring thoughtful engagement. This Design Jam aims to enact these approaches by engaging with community partners to address specific design challenges at the local level, for example, by co-designing democratic, participatory and arts-based initiatives. We further encourage our students and partners to envision the scaleable impact of these actions; From inspiring local communities in other locations to take on certain initiatives, to municipal, national or even transnational policy change protecting ecosystems and people from dire climate risks.
In Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings.
- Review of Escobar’s Design for the Pluriverse, Duke University Press, 2018
About the Jam
The Design Jam will take place on 5 Fridays between 29 September - 27 October 2023, incorporating design thinking to facilitate interdisciplinary student exploration and collaboration, project development, and problem-solving. It will consist of four facilitated workshops and one presentation/pitch day. Between workshops, students will be expected to work together in small global teams to expand on and test their design ideas. The Global Classroom team will provide guidance and feedback and help students prepare to present their work. Groups will present their projects to faculty and civil society / Global NGOs for real-world feedback.
This event is brought to you by University of Toronto, Hart House Global Commons, University of Toronto Scarborough (Canada), University West (Sweden), Stellenbosch University (South Africa), Participedia, Vancouver Design Nerds and the newly formed Cape Town Design Nerds.
Our community partners for include i4Policy, Africa, The Climate Reality Project, Canada and TNKVRT, Sweden.
