Inspire
A design program to teach design skills and practices to underserved youth communities in San Francisco
Date
2016 - 2017
Organization
California College of the Arts
My Role
Service design
Overview
Context
How might we build community resilience and use design to sow the seeds for long term social and systemic change? This was the invitation that inspired us to spend a year immersed in the landscape of San Francisco’s youth communities.
Challenge
San Francisco has undergone remarkable changes over the past decades. The city has become a front runner in many fields but over the course of time a considerable population of the city has been left behind. “Summer slide” is the tendency for students to lose some of the achievement gains they made during the previous school year. Compared to their peers, low-income students are not able to afford expensive summer programs putting them at a higher disadvantage impacting their ability to graduate and find employment.
Solution
The Digital Lab was a series of design workshops to help middle and high school students youth develop the skills that would inspire agency, artistic practice, community building and problem solving. We collaborated with several community arts organizations to co-create a series of free workshops over the summer.
Impact
We created a toolkit based on our insights for fellow design educators to replicate the Digital Lab model. We also set up a physical space at our partner organization; Root Division, a local arts non-profit to be used for youth programming. The success of these workshops led to us being invited to teach an Interaction Design program at the Urban School of San Francisco.
Communities are the experts in designing for themselves.
Through our process, we met and forged relationships with community art organizations doing impactful work with underserved youth in San Francisco. Meeting these inspiring leaders in the community helped us to recognize the importance of co-design between designers and the community. We believe that communities are experts in designing for themselves and our role as designers is to facilitate the process. Partnering with the people who experience a social problem allows us to evaluate whether an initiative is effective in its context or not. Floating above is a list of inspiring community arts organizations in San Francisco that we partnered with.
Photo by William Bout