Design Studio 02 - 1st class

Kick-off - Reframing by reflecting on your project so far

Assignment:

Reflection, objective:

I arrived to MDEF with a topic I wanted to explore more at a course which enables me to experiment with it from many perspectives. At MDEF the students from many backgrounds and the lecturers from many backgrounds as well dealing with many emergent topics, giving us agency about our personal and professional role in this rapidly changing world.

I arrived to the course with the aim to explore all the potentials it can give me to open my eyes more through the mindset of distributed design, Fablab and Barcelona / Poblenou the most innovative ‘hub’ for communities and dialogues in urban spaces. I arrived to a city and to a community which takes continuous development as a must.

MDEF and Fablab enables me to explore the ‘Future of Learning’, issues connected to ‘Civic Ecology’, the solution that ‘Distributed Design’ can offer us as designers and thinkers and the mindset of designing and researching for ‘Productive Cities’. All the possibilities which are key points of my research:

My research topic and later my fight came from the interests of: How can we creates liveable and happy cities through sub-systems of it, just like implementing child rights into our cities through child friendly sub-systems and how can we see each other’s realities for better collective futures, using the method of co-creation or participatory planning.

As a product and service designer or as a design researcher I addressed topics and projects in these topics, such as: With the MUS-E program we integrated Yehudi Menuhin’s educational system int the Hungarian state educational program, working together with designers from different fields.. I even facilitated a workshop teaching Waldorf (alternative school system) students some methods of design thinking as a tool applicable in everyday life. Further on I also participated in an international Social Hackhathon with EYA, where we designed an application that has the potential of empowering children to make their own decisions and to exercise their right to freedom of speech. Our latest project with a group of social designers at MOME’s Innovation Center Sustainability HUB was a workshop series, which engages teenage girls in experimental product manufacturing with the aim of strengthening their manual and technical abilities, their problem solving skills and their agency, i.e. social and individual capacity for action.

And one of the most important experience was when writing my BA senior thesis about Liveable cities and their alternative subsystems, to work with UNICEF on events which connects, decision makers, child right activists, university students and children in the topic of child friendly city initiatives.

Working an all these topics made me deeply interested in tackling a problem connected to accelerating urbanisation, the fact that: by 2050, over 66% of the global population will reside in cities, and 92% of this urban growth is expected to occur in the Global South. -

“This new wave of urbanization is driven not only by the traditional forces, but by emerging environmental and geopolitical trends, ranging from civil wars to mega-droughts, that contribute to displacement and forced migration. This escalating speed and scale of urban growth poses particular challenges in the spaces of: infrastructure, human mobility, basic services, violence and hazards, and connectivity” - Innovating for Children in an urban environment, UNICEF + arm use-case hand book - Which can affect mostly, the most vulnerable layer of society, the children and for which they have to be the most aware of the impact of their decisions as the ones who will be dealing with it.

By now, after all the projects I tried to address these problems with at the 1st trimester, I realised how important it is to see each other’s realities in our own urban environment and by being aware of those we can see the lack of inclusivity and equity in these spaces, the lack of children’s voices and by that already their rights in these environments. Consequently by Design Dialogues and by now I want to find ways and platforms to be able and use our cities as a - Playground for all - where there is an action between the “users” of our cities and where we co-create for living together, for understanding our present and help our future together. It can be a platform an educational method, a tool-kit, but by now for sure I want to do it through a Network, such as the Social Design Network for addressing these questions through different cultures but by the same approaches, such as with the Distributed Design Platform for an open source and distributed availability for the solution.