Arab Spring Designing Politics hearing
05.12.2011
Joanna Choukeir from Uscreates collaborated with MENA Design Research Centre to run a workshop at this year’s Arab Spring Designing Politics hearing, organised by ifg and hfg in Ulm, Germany.
With the majority of participants coming from a European context, and as both MENA’s DRC and Uscreates employ user centered principles, we challenged ourselves to design a workshop that best contextualises the Arab Spring, but in Germany.
We crowd-sourced the issue to be addressed in the workshop. A couple of weeks prior to the workshop, we organised a tweetup asking our active social media network in the Arab world the following question:
“What is the key political issue in MENA today and why? #ArabIssue”
The responses could be summarised as:
“Most Arabs have a closed mind when they could have a more critical mind.”
So we focused the workshop challenge on co-designing family/educational/community interventions that encourage young people in the Arab world to develop a more critical, questioning, mind that is able to contribute to positive change in society.
We called the workshop: “Thakafa: How can we co-design the Arab mind of the future.” (Thakafa stands for education in Arabic)
The workshop started with an Arab pop-quiz as a warm up to break any stereotypes and neutralise the setting. We then invited participants to skim through all the tweetup responses to understand the challenge at hand in the Arab world’s ‘own voice’. The workshop was then split into two rounds:
1. Discover & define the challenge
Participants were introduced to Naji, a 12 year old boy, and a scenario from his lifestyle. Participants split into three teams: Naji’s home, school, and community. Each team had a number of personas that were key players in that team. For example, the home consisted of Naji, his mother, father and grandmother. The school personas were Naji, his teachers, classmate and janitor. His community brought together the shop owner, neighbour, religious mentor, blogger, etc. To ensure participants walked in the shoes of the personas in the scenario, each adopted a persona, rehearsed a role play conversation, and ‘became’ that persona for the entire length of the workshop. To define the challenge, each team then made a list of all the barriers in their environment that stood in the way of Naji developing a critical mind, and another list of all the opportunities that new ideas could build on.
2. Develop & deliver solutions
For a truly co-designed experience, teams mixed in the develop round so that the home/school/community players (including Naji) met up for the first time and put their heads together to generate solutions. Ideas were then delivered through presentations in front of conference attendees for feedback and discussion. Doreen also invited participants to apply to take part in the Desmeem project if anyone was interested in taking ideas further beyond the workshop.
It was exciting to see how understanding a set scenario and role playing the personas resulted in contextualised tangible ideas. These included:
- Granny positive storytelling evening
- Shop owners forum enhancing positive connections in the community
- Anonymous social networking platform matching youth interests (rather than demographics)
- Exploration school trips to bigger cities
- Visual coding game to communicate via images rather than words
See a video from the conference here.
Thakafa Co-design Workshop from Uscreates on Vimeo.
Click images to enlarge
