'Teen-scape': designing participations for the design excluded
Abstract
Aside from designing artefacts, designers can also design participations with people. This paper is a reflection of an eighteen-month design experiment by a design researcher with different designers aiming to develop a relationship with staff members and students of a secondary school. From this responsive experiment, four identified types or steps of design participations were identified: 1) innovation led by designers; 2) collaboration between designers and the 'users'; 3) emancipation focuses on how users invite professional designers to share design thinking and finally, 4) motivation is about projects initiated by 'users' to invite designers to co-designing. The result of this period of engagement is 'Teen-scape', a new school playground, designed by a design graduate, through exposure to methods for design inclusion. The introduction of creative thinking from design studies into the secondary school environment, through this design engaging process, demonstrates how design can instigate a transformation of lives, whilst highlighting the importance of people participation and the role of design facilitators who instigate and inform the participation. The main aim is to urge a new design discipline, entitled the Design Participations, which is a design study area extending creative thinking to design processes that engage people in design.
