Designing for Diversity, 2023
In partnership with ENSCI-Les Ateliers (Paris, France).
This course was Co-lead by Sarngsan Na Soontorn (ENSCI-Les Ateliers) and Job Rutgers (OCAD University).
Students were invited to a five-day design workshop in Toronto, Canada with design students from ENSCI-Les Ateliers and OCAD University (Toronto, Canada) that investigated a new role for designers as ‘cultural connectors’. Students were encouraged to look at the cultural diversity in multicultural urban areas with an optimistic, ‘designerly’ attitude. This stance is based on the assumptions that each culture should be respected, and each culture has valuable elements or assets to share. Instead of tackling negative judgements, we focused on the everyday interactions between different cultures who are co-living and co-working in the same urban or rural parts.
The overall aim of the course was for students to learn to understand the complex cultural fabric both our societies are made up from, but also to design and ‘embroider’ functional, cultural, emotional ‘experiences’ that can connect different ‘cultural threads’ into meaningful, respectful, and mutually beneficial ways.
Cultural diversity in an urban context of people, places and everyday lives.
The GTA area is the worlds’ most culturally diverse location, which people from over a hundred countries call their home. Inclusive Design for cultural diversity addresses one of the big challenges in today's society. This course showed students how they can design better, through cultural inclusive public experiences by understanding, synthesising and integrate the most interesting and relevant aspects of different cultural backgrounds and traditions into innovative solutions.
Students from OCADU and ENSCI worked together on a case study on the town of Mississauga that is prepared by OpenCity Projects, a leading Toronto design Think Tank. Lectures were also provided by thought leaders on Design for Cultural Diversity from across the GTA, such as Saffy. Workshops also included site visits, and urban observations.
The learning outcomes included the following:
- Inclusive Collaboration; learning how to naturally engage with a diverse group of people in safe, inspiring, and productive design sessions.
- Inclusive behavior; Learning how to be inclusive of the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference.
- Opportunities in complexity; By learning to see the complexity of the ‘cultural fabric’, learning how to spot unique opportunities for connections that would otherwise go unnoticed.
- Forging Creative connections; Learning how to to chart the different cultural drivers and synthesize or ‘sense’ possible connections and relationships based on intuition, broad knowledge, and past experiences.
- Urban co-design; Becoming familiar with the current discourse on co-design and how it can be applied within cultural complex, urban development processes.
Check out the previous Designing for Diversity collaboration HERE