How can we raise awareness and stimulate dialogue in schools about cooperation among transnational communities and migration? How can we inspire teenagers to rethink an apparently boring subject in a fresher and more tangible way?

Design opportunity and outcome

Ideas to move is an educational program focused on teen citizens to raise awareness about Cooperation for development. Realized as part of a larger EU-funded project focused on migration and cooperation, it is promoted by a team of 8 EU municipalities geographically dispersed in Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Estonia, Latvia.
It consists of a set of informative websites, a mobile web app, and a classroom workshop format to discuss and elaborate upon the subject of focus:
• 1 webapp for use among peers and students via social channels and active promotion: it requires a quick interaction to gain content access;
• 1 editorial website, based much on visuals, answering and raising questions about Cooperation for development;
• 1 institutional website documenting specific experiences in cooperation for development;
• workshop class format: downloadable PDF manual, and a splash page giving first information about the workshop, directed at educators;
• 1 dedicated CMS complementary to the workshop format, for educators and students to contribute contents.

“We’d like to achieve more than what we can with lecture-style lessons on Cooperation for Development. Something more stimulating and with more interacton from teenagers.”

Scheme and hierarchy of the project elements of which Ideas to move consists of. The webapp is the quickest interaction point, and enables users to go further into the subject. The classroom workshop is intended to feed user generated content to the webapp.

Challenges and implementation

Reach and engage teens in secondary schools, where the project’s partners were holding educational programmes with educators lecturing in front of the class. The approach we proposed embraces different levels of deepening on the subject: first an access points for users with shorter attention opportunity, but with the possibility for those most interested to proceed to further information. To achieve both short and longer cycles of engagement we provide a specific content tool for each cycle.

Pivotal to the experience is the classroom experience: the format we designed and tested is based on HCD approach and focuses on dialogue among peers as the most important activity.

Which multilingual approach to adopt for the project? We decided to make multilingualism central part of the experience and leverage on the diversity of expressions. Each user-contributed content is delivered in its original language, with the possibility for translation. The geographical location of the contributors becomes part of a visual rewarding in the web app experience – with the ultimate goal to highlight the connectedness despite the distances and borders.

CLASSROOM WORKSHOP TESTS and refinement: the goal was to stimulate peer to peer dialogue, and to enable the classroom to efficiently propose and share content based on their own experiences regardin the main subject.

 

Process

From the quicker webapp requiring seconds of attention to get first results, to editorial websites using visual and text languages to convey information, to the classroom workshop format that leads the students into active discussion and content creation, Ideas to move provides a set of tools to be used by the project’s partners to engage their users and listen to their ideas on the subject.

It is developed as a PWA and not a native app to have a quicker onboarding.

We tested and refined the Ideas to move app experience with target users: we gathered insights and very useful suggestions that we then used in the experience. Paper prototyping, direct interviews and group brainstormings were used in this phase.

After brainstorming ideas about the classroom workshop format, together with a partner school we tested and refined the format with target users. This required quite a few testing sessions and allowed to define a workable format for a workshop that should be understood and operated from schools all over EU.

As project leader and lead designer in this project I curated the process and designed the solutions for the challenges above. I confronted and discussed with my peers and organized trial workshops to test and evaluate the ideas. I directly designed the websites’ structure, wireframes, interaction and interface schemes. In close collaboration with the game designer I  designed, tested and iterated the workshop format, together with a game designer consultant. I coordinated till delivery a team comprising: 1 creative coder, 1 game designer, 1 visual designer, 1 copywriter.

Click to go to “Ideas to move” web application.

My role:

Lead creative direction
Workshops coordination, client presentations
Content coordination
User research, User Experience, Wireframing
Visual team and dev coordination

Client:

Municipality of Bologna
Project with Studio too