DESIGN FOR CHANGE, 28TH AUGUST 2017

Date: 28th August 2017
Time: 11am to 12:30pm
Venue: ABACA

On 28th August 2017, Toybank organized a session on Design for Change. This session was conducted by Ms Nirali Parekh Rathi.

The session began with an introduction, with each member taking a minute to introduce themselves. This mostly comprised of the name of the individual, time spent at Toybank and the role that the individual played at Toybank. Toybank team member Madhulika introduced Nirali briefly. Nirali shared her purpose of doing this workshop with Toybank, which was to use her understanding of design to bring about meaningful change.

The session started with two activities, the first was to make a tower of balloons. The participants were split into two groups, with each group having to make a tall tower of balloons within the time limit. The two teams gave their best to win this activity! The skills learned from this activity were team work, strategizing, and understanding that constraints from our external environment will always exist to deter us.

 

The second exercise was to design a bag for a partner. The participants were put into pairs and the activity was broken down into 3 parts – first, drawing a bag based on their understanding of their partner. Second, asking questions to understand the need of the person. Third, designing it based on their understanding of their partner. The outcome of this activity was to teach participants the importance of not basing our work on assumptions but instead to ask relevant and deeper questions to allow them to create a design based on the needs of the individual who will be using it rather than designing a solution based on their own assumptions.

 

Nirali also presented two video clips of projects for Design for Change. The first was about a school’s canteen that was accessed by both the senior and younger children. The problem identified was that the older children were not allowing the younger students to use it as often. Using the process of Design for Change, a few changes such as making the serving platforms lower and queuing. These changes allowed the problem to be solved by the children independently. The second video was about how a school had dealt with the issue of bullying.

We ended the session by thrashing out an impressive plan to replicate the Design for Change project in 3- 4 of our centres.