TITLE: BOVISA X CO-DESIGN : Connecting students with the outside community
WHY?
We would like to connect the university with the neighborhood through activities that can be useful for both parties. Bovisa is a neighborhood that has many real problems that students can solve or make it visible. Our idea is that the people’s needs or “projects brief” come from the interaction between students and community. Needs are based on problem that community faces every day. Community care about that problems and is interested in solving them. Nowadays we have students that go out of the university just to collect information and then come back to develop in a “secret” way they project they are working for. We would like to change the current design process through activities such as co-design to make feasible our project and make the people of Bovisa feel part of the “team”.
WHAT?
The people of the neighborhood offer us information about the real problems present and we provide them with solutions. Since design students work on different topics every year there is the possibility to develop projects from different areas of expertise and give to teams the opportunity to learn on the fly and testing their ideas in the real world.
HOW?
We would like to achieve that goal through the involvement of some fix representative of University such as professors. They work as facilitator in order to promote this projects to different courses or levels. We would create an Identity for this initiative in order to make it visible and recognizable. By using a common platform, we want to show what we can do for them and stimulate the conversation about what could be done. Students will have the possibility to organize activities such as focus group, workshop, games etc. to collect knowledge and involving people. Exhibitions of the projects in the neighborhood could be the possibility to share the outcome with the community and make an evaluation of them. In this way, there will be the opportunity to take the most suitable solution and implement them.
I would like to make a comment to your idea and pssdgroup5 I must say that it is a brilliant topic and also a very huge space to contribute and envelope students and helping them on their way forward.
I can value this very good, because my country Kosovo ( FYR Of Yugoslavien ) is the only state in the Europe Union which citizens are forbiden to travel abroad Kosovo,although we have family members and friends in every country in Europe we are not allowed to travel in Schengen Zone without a special permission which is permitted to only 10% of the popullation. The youth and the students are suffering from this, making them unable po expand their knowledge and reach higher level of education, we are censured to one of the human rights, free movement of the popullation.
There are several student exchange programs with the United States and the EU which would be very helpfull to start sharing and collecting new connections and educations. I have needed such a exchanging programm as a student, eventhough i didn’t make it to be a part of an exchange program as a participiant.
I know travel is problematic for non-Schengen because I grew up with it (I’m Romanian). My life changed completely at 15 when I traveled abroad for the first time, and has shaped who I am today, and where I live (I recently moved to Brussels). @Jack_Dushica if you could use additional help or any sort of references, recommendations to access an exchange program, Edgeryders is surely happy to help. We are an international/ Europe based organisation, no employees and many collaborators for mutual support. For example if members want to write funding applications and could use to apply with Edegryders (in its name), the core team is happy to help set you up. Ourselves we also felt our rights were being flushed away in the aftermatch of Brexit so we just moved our company in Estonia to preserve the values and rights we care about. Alberto just blogged about it here.
The project above is about having students in a neighborhood in Milano go outside their design bubble and talk to the people in the neighborhood. So not so much about international traveling, but about - like you say - learning and accessing new knowledge.