Gen Z Designers Ideation Workshop
︎ 2023Something I’ve been interested in lately is the idea of Citizen Designers. My design research project in the Fall semester of 2023 revolved around this concept and how it could be applied to Gen Z design students. As part of my research I lead an Ideation Workshop for undergraduate students in the UARK design program. The main ideation activity for this workshop was to brainstorm a new platform for members of Gen Z to engage with civic issues.
The full slide set for this workshop is included below:
Part of the ideation process involved a mapping activity so participants could reflect on the platforms they already interact with. The two different maps were helpful in identifying trends in the existing civic engagement habits of members of Gen Z.
The first map used a sticker chart to indicate how participants might hear about news issues of different scales through different kinds of platforms. The second map was a grid where atendees plotted all of the news sources by writing them directly on the paper. The location was an evaluation of how informative and how engaging the source is.
Finally, the ideation began! Informed by our group discussion and our mapping activity, participants used provided worksheets to brainstorm a brand new platform for civic issues. As Gen Z designers, the participants were uniquely equipped to combine their insider knowlege of the audience with their creative problem sloving skills.
This workshop is absolutely repeatable and I look forward to hosting it again in the future. All of the assets used are part of tool kit that can be used to prompt Gen Z designers to think of themselves as Citizen designers.
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