Community Engagement¶
General reflection¶
For me, community engagement was one of the most interesting courses, mainly because I currently work as a community participation consultant, so this was a very attractive methodological update. Among the elements that caught my attention was the approximation with Bruno Latour theory, about the relationship between human and non-human in a network.
I considering fundamental to include the non-human elements when we are designing, because today we’re interacting with that kind of things all day. For example, social networks, apps and smart devices are part of our interactions, and it is neccesary to map, because they represent an alternative to change habits and patterns. The Obesity System Map exercise was eye-opening for me, as I was able to see in an exemplified way elements that can be mapped and that interact with people. This inspired me to make a small-scale map of my intervention:
My intervention seeks to build a vision around the relationship with the environment from the vision of school students. Doing this exercise beforehand allowed me to recognize the limitation associated with schools: for example their curricular protocols, so to face this problem together with Jimena (classmate) we approached Xavi to talk to him so he could help us.
Local Ecosystem Mapping¶
From the roleplaying activity I learned a new way of being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and get their perspective on a project. The exercise stimulated to find points of agreement and points of controversy, so we were able to work on a “wicked problem” in an applied way, which was very interesting. For my intervention I put myself in the role of school principals, and one of the insights I detected was the need to link my intervention with the contents of their courses.
Human prototype¶
As part of the course exercise we prototyped with our bodies the relationships in the university educational system. Collectively we listed the different actors and then with our creativity we simulated the relationships in the network.
This exercise was very effective to realize how our bodies can communicate and what is our own point of view regarding how the relationship is currently and how it should be.
This is a good activity to break the ice, experiment and see what our body is saying unconsciously.
Creative Community Engagement¶
Creative community: School in Poblenou and Badalona.
Context: Caring the environment is in general limited to recycling, but today people take care of their environment in a lot of different ways. My idea is working with 6-9 year old school children to understand their perception of climate change and caring of environment.
Current situation: schools are very interested in participating in issues related to the environment. This is a good opportunity to generate scalable and deep work. Schools are ideal contexts since there are fewer distractions and there is supervision by teachers.
Engagement and limits: Working with children is delicate, we must protect their rights and identities, so we will adhere to strict commitments regarding the use of information. At the same time, we will be concerned that our work does not deepen discrimination or eco-anxiety in children.
Theory of change: We want to understand and design from the vision of the future that the children of Barcelona have. The future is mainly theirs, so we want to be a tool to materialize their desires. Personally I want to revalue and perfect different ways of caring for the environment, outside of the most obvious and traditional ways.
Design challenges: carry out an attractive and playful activity, since children at that age can be easily distracted. At the same time, being able to achieve the objective of collecting the visions they have can be complex, a poorly executed exercise can waste our opportunity and hinder all future work.
Design opportunities: building collectively is always a good opportunity to materialize new insights. The greatest opportunity that exists is to generate a positive impact in different dimensions: literacy about caring of environment, proactivity, the maker spirit and the articulation of communities with the same objective. My idea is through the intervention to empower children to be agents of change and ambassadors of new ways to protect the environment.
