Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Designing Dublin 2009

We are Designing Dublin.

The Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn project will bring together 9 citizens, 7 Dublin City Council and 1 Fingal County Council employees to work on a Dublin specific project. The team of 17 will combine their expertise, willingness, creativity, and knowledge of the city’s policies and initiatives to invent solutions for an area of the city.

Designing Dublin.

Our project intends to engage individuals in a design process that generates collaboration, invents solutions and builds entrepreneurship by giving you the opportunity to interact with Dublin city as a living laboratory.

We need a Culture of Learning.

In these times of transition radical reinvention is needed across all of life.

We believe that by building a Culture of Learning we can provide a new generation of entrepreneurs with the tools to design inventive solutions to the new global challenges – learning, mobility, shelter, diversity, public space, sustainability and health.

To grow a Culture of Learning we need an open, holistic and dynamic new learning system. A model that is multi-disciplinary, collaborative, iterative, driven by curiosity, inclusive, experiential, real world, public, solution-driven and which most importantly encourages people to understand how they can contribute purposefully to the future of their country and to the world in the 21st Century.

We believe that there is no perfect answer when defining this new learning system. We have decided to begin anywhere by running the Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn pilot. Our intention is to test Design Thinking as a tool to empower learning that generates solutions through proposals, ideation, prototyping, testing and iteration.

Learning to learn.

17 individuals have been invited to join the Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn pilot and will work collaboratively on a multi-disciplinary team over the course of three months to research, invent and prototype solutions for a Dublin city project.

The team will join a purpose-driven experience and will:

Work on a very complex, very public project.
Collaborate on a multi-disciplinary team.
Undergo immersive learning.
Learn to question the questions.
Broaden citizen participation through discourse.
Use Dublin as a living laboratory.
Tap into existing knowledge.
Scout for new knowledge.
Invent solutions.
Prototype and iterate.

As part of the discourse and learning from the experience, the Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn team will participate in Innovation Dublin – a week-long festival of workshops, events and showcases highlighting and encouraging innovation in the city.

Our project.

It is very important to us that the selected Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn pilot project be inclusive and responsive of everyone’s wishes for Dublin city. Citizens are the people who interact, move, experience, live and play in the city scape.

We were curious to know how citizens thought Dublin could be turned into a better city. With the help of a team of enthusiastic Marketing Advisors from the Michael Smurfit School of Business in UCD, we spent three weeks collecting wishes for Dublin from different citizens – children, teenagers, young adults, mature adults and pensioners. The UCD marketing team had conversations with over 1000 people! The collected wishes will help to inform the project that the Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn team will collaborate on in the autumn.

Our partners.

The Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn pilot will involve many citywide partners who will help to define solutions to the project. As part of the learning process, team members will draw from the expertise of both national and international academics, experts, artists, researchers, urban planners, architects, scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and many more people.

For one week in October a team of KaosPilots from Aarhus, Denmark will join the Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn team. The intention of this cross-pollination will be to share tools and expertise to promote invention through learning.

Our direct partners are Dublin City Council and Creative Dublin Alliance.