Community Engagement¶

Reflection¶

This seminar for Community Engagement was helpful to see frameworks and examples for how to successfully facilitate workshops and approach communities to design with. It was helpful to think about how to practically work with stakeholders that have their own motivations and maneuver between a variety of perspectives and needs within a community project. We did a hypothetical role playing of stake holders that would work with a local building and residency. Acting out how each role would interact with each other, and understanding each role’s needs and motivations. I enjoyed visiting local places in Poblenou that have created open spaces for artists and the surrounding neighborhood to collaborate. Two of the places we visited were working with food waste and biomaterials to make products, education, and designs. Poblenou has an interesting dynamic with the gentrification of tech, it was good to see artist spaces and organizations that are working to keep historical buildlings preserved and think about what role artists play in that preservation.

Intervention Outline Community Framework¶

Exercise on engaging with local community:

Creative community: I am interested in working with local communities who work with people that have been marginalized or have difficulty meeting their basic needs.

Context: Each city has their own social dynamics that contribute to the wellbeing of specific communities. Whether it is by race, gender, or socio-economic status, there is an imbalance of opportunity and services for specific groups of people. Coming from Seattle where there is an increasing gap of rich vs. poor, gentrification, and a growing population of people experiencing homelessness, I am curious to know in Barcelona what the dynamics and situations are here.

Current situation: From my current and limited understanding, there is a large population of migrant workers and refugees. There are marginalized groups of people based on their race, socio-economic status, and legal documentation. There are people living on the street but also services addressing food and shelter in their own ways. It seems that there is community involvement in many areas, but the communication between services is still limited as each group is addressing issues in their own way.

Engagement & Limits: Takes time to engage and understand the current situation and organizations. I am an outsider and come with my own biases, understandings, and interpretations. I understand that I will make my own judgements before fully understanding the whole situation, and need to be aware of those.

Theory of change: Connecting services to one another and drawing bridges between different organizations could help to make sure there are no gaps of people being reached out to or addressed. It also could help to create ways of collaboration between multiple organizations.

Design challenges & opportunities: The main challenge is to first engage and observe, because there may be a desire for design but it is more important to understand these situations before jumping to any action. At this stage it is most important to be a listener, open minded, and learn from others.

The following images are from our 4D map performing an embodiment of what “higher education” looks like. This was an exercise to map out the various components that make up a system and how they relate to each other. We did this exercise in silence and acted it out, it was interesting to see how we worked together and related to one another as we each made a pose of how we would embody that part of the system.

First is a model on how we perceive the current system to be, and the second show show we would like it to be. Each of us played a different role in the system from institution, government, student, opportunity, access to money, research and more. CE1 CE2