Design thinking to support underserved communities in the North-East of Mexico

Juan Manuel Fernández Cárdenas and Christina Reynaga-Peña from TEC de Monterrey in Mexico organised a week-long workshop on ‘Reducing marginalisation and promoting inclusive education with the mediation of digital technology’ in February 2018. Here is a summary of the workshop.

Over 80 participants, including teachers, teacher trainees, researchers, governmental and non-governmental organisations from the North-East of Mexico, bordering to the USA, came to participate. They developed projects to support underrepresented communities to get fair and equal access to education, work and social inclusion in society.

I was invited to give a keynote on using Design Thinking for inclusive and creative STEM education. First, I talked about the role of the Open University to support access to higher education for everyone. Then I focused on how we support creativity through inclusive learning designs, tools for engagement and reflective practices. Finally, I argued for contextual creativity in designing educational innovations.

There was a series of further keynotes on Design Thinking and STEM education.

The workshop started with an empathising session. Representatives from three underserved communities, 1 Campana-Altamira, an impoverished community in Monterrey, 2 indigenous communities, especially the Oaxaca (Wahaca), and 3 physically-disabled learners. The session was also recorded (in Spanish).

Participants were offered some key insights about these communities and the challenges they face from those at the frontline or immediately affected.

The next day, participants chose a community to work with, then they got to know each other and tried to better understand the problem and context of the community. Aim of this session was to find an appropriate ‘How might we’ question that frames the problem in a way that allows for creative, inclusive and achievable ideas to solve some of the communities’ problems. Problem framing is one of the most difficult steps in design thinking and we could see that many groups were challenged by choosing a well-defined goal, often the problem was too broadly defined.

The following day we worked some more on making the “How might we’ questions more accessible, appropriate and focused, and then we had a fantastic ideation session, using our U101 creativity cards. Everyone listened to the ideas the groups came up with before each group selected one idea to prototype. I was truly stunned by the variety of ideas and the quality of the prototypes the participants produced. Fifteen project ideas were presented to representatives from governmental bodies, non-governmental organisations and the British Council who fund projects like these.

Here is a selection of some of my favourites:

A book tree to playfully engage the Campana-Altamira community in knowledge exchange as a social activity:

An exceptionally designed maker-lab facility for the Campana-Altamira community to produce, attract visitors and sell locally made products.

Vertical gardening communities in Campana-Altamira to deliver contextually integrated STEM education (biology, maths and engineering etc.)

Self-assembled glasses simulating different degrees of sight-impairment:

A platform that highlights the capabilities and strengths of impaired jobseekers.

A system to identify the mood of a community by a simple visual voting system.

The last day of the workshop was dedicated to writing grant proposals to get funding and to turn the ideas into reality.

I do hope that some of these projects make it to that stage.


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One response to “Design thinking to support underserved communities in the North-East of Mexico”

  1. Juan Manuel Fernández Cárdenas avatar

    Hi Nicole, many thanks for sharing this note in your blog. We very much enjoyed and appreciated your contributions, as well as Geoffrey Wake’s insights. There are more resources and videos of STEM education for reducing marginalization in http://www.stemk12dialogue.net/ (in Spanish).
    Also, a very recent Special Issue on this topic is available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjet20/44/1?nav=tocList
    There are many ways in which we can continue collaborating, the affordances of design education for social innovation are evident. We look forward to meeting you soon again!

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