This is a cross post from my MSc Student blog which we use to chart our progress through our final projects. This year marks the beginning of my project work and these Blog Task Posts form part of our initial scoping and project planning. This post responds to a prompt asking us to imagine our dream project.

I would like to work with several diverse groups of similarly aged children or young people. We would have two or three school days together to work  use a variety of design research methods to consider their preferred educational futures, We would do three things:

  1. Collaboratively create a speculative scenario focussed on an educational future. I would like to ground the stages of the work that follow in this co-created scenario (rather than simply presenting the children or young people with a scenario I have created).

  2. Respond to this scenario in a way that creatively articulates how they want education to be. The question remains to focus on one design research method or try and create a set of shorter activities utilising a variety of methods. The children/young people would work in smaller groups and have the opportunity to explore each others work.

  3. Create a public group display, statement or manifesto synthesising the children/young peoples work. Thereby giving them an authentic audience/outlet.

  4. A final fourth step might be to connect the different groups work to the current policy landscape. This could be done by utilising some type of trend map or final report.

An important part of this work is the diverse nature of the groups I would work with. Scotland – like any nation is diverse in all sorts of ways (geographic, cultural, socio-economic) there is an obligation to present the type of future forecasting I'm considering here in a way that reflects that diversity, rather than gloss over it.

This approach is inspired by a variety of sources discovered during my EFI courses and wider reading. These include: