“Yourb. Innovatori Urbani” aims to innovate the communication and the exchange between citizens by intervening on the scarcity of educational paths in schools steered to promote a conscious attitude on individual and collective rights amongst younger generations. A format that responds to the need to activate citizenship with a bottom-up approach, through the training and dissemination of Design Thinking and Social Innovation, Design methodologies, turning students into real “urban innovators”.
Local
Italy
City of Turin, Piedmont
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): APS Print Club Torino Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Giuseppe Last name of representative: Quercia Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Legal representative Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 25 Town: Turin Postal code: 10125 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 393 803 7868 E-mail:hello@printclubtorino.it Website:https://www.printclubtorino.it/
The project aims to raise students' awareness regarding the issues of active citizenship and proposes to do so by supporting them and making them become protagonists in the creation of a social design format dedicated to the social needs of the city community.
The goal is to transfer to the students involved in the initiative the design methodologies of design thinking and social design; this to give the participants the tools to develop a complete design approach, bottom-up and iterative (problem definition > data analysis > creativity > technology > experimentation > feedback analysis > sharing > return) with which to address relevant issues for contemporary citizenship.
Students are trained on this methodology thanks to a toolkit, a guide and a checklist for the implementation of civic projects to stimulate creativity, problem-solving and the ability of participants to propose and implement innovative, empathic and impact-driven solutions.
The test bench for the proposed new approach are thematic workshops in which participants confront real problems affecting global and local citizenship trying to develop new social communication solutions to test in the field and transform, if successful, in replicable best-practices.
In addition to the school context, the project interacts with citizens through a "cascading" involvement which includes the direct participation of the public community through moments of exchange and sharing of the results achieved.
The dissemination of the project is also facilitated by the publication of the online toolkit together with the launch of the website that offers an overview of the project and presents the partners and professionals who have joined as Ambassadors of the initiative. In addition, from the website it is possible to download the toolkit (free of charge) and extend to other schools or organizations the possibility to take part in the next scheduled activities.
Innovation
Social Design
Community
City
Technologies
The workshop format of Yourb is intended to provide students with the tools to develop civic awareness and responsibility. The adoption of a design approach, which lays its foundations in Social Innovation Design as the main methodology through which to stimulate change, aims to present to students civic responsibility from a broader perspective, which considers not only the relationship between humans but also that between humans and nature with a Planet-Centered approach, promoting a new paradigm that focuses on the community in its global meaning, respecting the ecosystem to which we belong. The project team promotes civic education as a key element that can safeguard both democracy and the sustainability of the planet. It is strongly believed that it is through experiences of active citizenship that skills and visions of the future can be shaped.
For this reason, among the focuses chosen for the workshop there is the theme Territory, which invites students to reflect on their relationship with the urban context and to rethink it in a sustainable way, both through human relationships and its impact on the planet.
The project was born from the awareness that beauty is an excellent tool to rise awareness among citizens who do not have technical skills about the topic of change. For years art has been committed to the enhancement of the environment in which we live and therefore with Yourb it was considered useful to include this element in the training: introduce participants to methods and practices that can activate public places used only as a transit and passage space, transforming them into "inhabited" spaces, such as the creative examples of the 70s-80s (Ugo La Pietra in primis) to stimulate the concept of today’s urban space in a new, living, useful, and collective way. This awareness of the city as a consequence, can produce a sense of civic responsibility in younger people.
For this reason, the training course has been conceived in collaboration with different local realities that deal with art and visual communication. This involvement served, on the one hand, to bring the students closer to the issues addressed, on the other, to raise awareness of citizens during dissemination activities.
Among the focus of the training course a prevailing theme was precisely Community, aware that it is essential to transfer to younger people the concept that individual actions have effects on collective actions, and that every individual is an individual operating in a community. Distancing themselves from traditional school programs, Yourb’s team believes that the best way to educate about inclusion is to teach students the principles of Social Design. Social design in fact gives to younger age people the critical tools that can protect against bullying, sexism, racism. This is especially important if you are experiencing a delicate phase of your development and are trying to build your individual and social self. Social design is a shield for the individual and a weapon for the community.
During the workshop, students were also invited to get in touch with different local communities through meetings with associations, street interviews and case study analysis. The goal for the future is to get students to directly collaborate with members of these communities and capture their hidden needs.
In addition to the intervention in the school context, the project has interacted with the citizenship through a "cascading" involvement that, starting from the core group of students, directly engaged in the training path, was extended to teachers, families, associations active in the area, to then reach the public community, through the performance of numerous moments of dissemination.
The first restitution event of the project was held in September 2021 with the duration of three days and included an exhibition about the workshop path experienced by students, and interviews with the professionals involved on the topics covered during the lessons. Alongside the exhibition, a program of meetings open to the public dedicated to activism and innovation in the field of urban regeneration was organized.
The moments of restitution and broadening of the impact of the project were then continued in 2022, with the start of collaborations with local training institutes together with which were presented a spin-off format of the project Yourb adapted to younger targets (age 6-11 years).
Finally, thanks to the collaboration with cultural events such as the Graphic Days festival, it was possible to organize a panel of activities (talks, workshops, kids labs) to raise awareness about the issues faced by the project such as the role of design, innovation and digital interaction in the creative learning process and the ability of social design to convey complex messages (environmental issues, gender, linguistic inclusion, cognitive disorders).
In addition to the in person activities, a significant role in the domain of citizenship involvement is played by the toolkit, downloadable free of charge from the project website.
The project was possible thanks to the collaboration between local non-profit organizations caring about the various aspects of art and socially committed to work in the field: Associazione Plug, Fondazione Contrada Onlus, Associazione Creo Ars Captiva. The project benefited from the support, at local level, of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, which financed the first edition of the project, and Città di Torino, which offered free use of public spaces for the realization of events to the public.
In addition to the partners, several professionals have been involved, such as Elena Ferrara, promoter in Italy of Law 71/17 to fight cyberbullying; Silvia Semenzin, promoter of the law against the non-consensual dissemination of private material online and today Head of Advocacy and Research of the Cyber Rights Organization (CRO) in The Hague; Nicolay Boyadjiev, tutor at the Strelka Institute in Design & Education; Ella Britton, coordinator of the Master of Art of Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures of the London College of Communication. Together with those also active bodies on topics treated at national level such as Fiab Torino Bike Pride, association for sustainable mobility in Turin; Maria Cristina Caimotto, expert in speech analysis and researcher at the University of Turin; FROM, Milanese city making agency and the art center Milano Mediterranea.
The project also involved the International Training Center of the ILO, together with whom was organized a day of workshops at the Turin Campus of the United Nations during which students entered the heart of the project putting into practice the methodologies of design-thinking learned during the previous meetings. The workshop invited the students to retrace all the phases of social planning, imagining new solutions to make the public spaces close to public transport stops more accessible.
The training path that constitutes Yourb format is based on the mixture of the following principles and methodologies:
Enhancing creativity
Jules Henri Poincaré defined creativity as "the ability to unite pre-existing elements into new, useful combinations". According to Poincaré, the intuitive criterion for recognizing such utility is the presence of a harmony between all components, which can thus respond uniquely to the purpose. Therefore creativity needs an objective: it must be finalized and strategic. Inspired by the scientist, the format invites participants to observe the surrounding environment from unprecedented points of view to find innovative and creative solutions to the needs of the citizenry.
Education to the systemic design methodology
Through a bottom-up process, the format invites students to be protagonists of social innovation: the first level is represented by the community directly involved in the process of study and designed by students, the second is represented by citizens invited to attend the dissemination outputs of the project (exhibitions, lectures etc...). Through the education of the design mindset and to the awareness about today’s social problems, students develop the concrete skills for a good systemic design with which to give life in first person to virtuous planning, capable, in the long term, to have social and cultural repercussions.
Creation of a toolkit
According to the designer Ezio Manzini, everyone designs using their skills to define and find answers to a problem. Manzini distinguishes between the "widespread design", that is the design that the human being naturally possesses, and the "expert design", understood as the method adopted by professionally trained people, equipped with all the necessary design and operational tools. Following this concept, the format has produced a toolkit for less experienced citizens to guide them in finding new effective solutions to problems.
Unlike traditional training courses, the format of Yourb is characterized by the adoption of a holistic approach that looks at the collective well-being of individuals taking into account the concrete issues of contemporaneity. In particular, to mature among students processes of active citizenship, the methodology used identifies three interconnected "laboratories" of experimentation entitled Community, Territory and Technology. As commented by Yourb Ambassador Elena Ferrara, they "are indeed areas, interconnected, in which young people live their own experiences, can orient themselves in the identification of socially relevant issues and find real spaces for participation to plan change".
Community
Why is it important to recognize the value of community? How can design build stronger bonds between people within a community? Together we can bring about positive change in society, achieve collective welfare and foster social inclusion.
Territory
How well do we know the city where we live? Places and people we meet every day have a great influence on how we think and act. But what can we do to improve them? From local to global - the glocal vision will help us find solutions to contemporary challenges.
Technology
Thanks to technological innovations we are always interconnected. How do we really recognize the importance of the digital space as a public place and its role in creating new ways of interaction between people?
For Yourb, designing social innovation actions means taking these aspects into account and using the most suitable tools to plan a strategy that has a positive impact on the community and finally also on individual well-being.
The Yourb project was the first field trial of a format that has the ambition of being spread and replicated as much as possible between educational institutions. The actors involved so far (schools, associations, professionals) are the first elements of a network that aims to promote a concrete methodological guide for civic activism, encouraging young people in particular to structure their social commitment with a systemic and strategic approach. The toolkit is therefore the means by which teachers, social workers and active bodies can orient their socio-cultural objectives towards the achievement of results with the greatest impact being formed to the principles of Social Design. Downloadable free online, the toolkit is also designed to stimulate the free initiative of young people and citizens without design skills to guide them in impact interventions for the community in which they live.
The educational path adopted by the format Yourb is placed in the pedagogical tradition from Dewey to Piaget to today’s teaching of Project-Based Learning (PBL), Design-Based Learning (DBL) and Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL). Together with the methodology of Social Design, it is also configured as an updating path for the teachers involved.
The design methodology adopted by the project is the one promoted by the Planet-Centered Design approach. This design approach is focused on designing collective well-being actions and solutions related to social innovation to solve unexpressed community needs. It helps to find new innovative solutions, actively involving in the design process people who face seemingly unsolvable problems every day.
An example of how this approach can be translated to action is the "Double Diamond" methodology described by the Design Council in 2004. The first diamond helps people understand what the problem is. It’s about talking and spending time with people who are directly impacted by the issues you intend to solve. The information gathered during the first phase can help define the challenge in a more inclusive way - focusing this time on people, their needs, strengths and aspirations.
The second diamond encourages people to find potential solutions to the challenge, seeking inspiration elsewhere and co-designing with a range of different people, making the whole process collaborative and open. The last phase involves experimenting with several small-scale solutions, discarding those that do not work and improving the most suitable ones. The trial is never over.
At the heart of the project is the aim of promoting, especially among young people, the skills needed to orient themselves in an increasingly complex world. The theme is at the center of international publications such as the European recommendation of 22 May 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning, the Unesco document on Education to Global Citizenship (2018) - drawn up in accordance with point 4.7 “Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship” of the 2030 Agenda - and the European Skills Agenda that identifies 21st century skills. These papers recognize the growing need for complexity training with the acquisition of transversal skills necessary to tackle the tasks of contemporary life. Faced with the continuous economic and socio-cultural changes, the need to provide future citizens with tools along with notions arises. The Yourb project consciously chooses to start from school to educate and foster through sharing the positive impact on society of personal skills, according to the republican conception of the citizenship model. An educational approach attentive to empower students and draw them towards their role as citizens.
With reference to the 2030 Agenda, the goals on which the project is most involved are:
4 - QUALITY EDUCATION
11 - SUSTAINABLE CITIES AND COMMUNITIES
The project was selected by the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo Call for applicants “CivICa” in 2019. The first edition was realized in partnership with Associazione culturale Plug, Associazione CREO - Ars Captiva e Fondazione Contrada Torino Onlus. The ILO International Training Center also participated in the project, alongside the research phase and definition of the project methodology.
Regarding the achieved results, today the project counts:
- 3 institutions involved;
- 3 classes (40 students in total);
- 60 total hours spent with students in each working group;
- 13 teachers;
- 17 professionals involved in training;
- 20 professionals involved in the dissemination activities;
- 3 local communities contacted;
- 8 cultural associations/organizations involved, of which 4 extra-local;
- 37 toolkits downloaded;
- more than 200 citizens and 300 families involved in the dissemination activities.
The Yourb project contributes to all three main objectives of the European competence framework on sustainability.
1. Thanks to the training course designed for schools, Yourb brings to traditional schools a content program designed to develop in young people the new skills required by a changing world.
2. On the other hand, the digital toolkit aims to respond to the need for training and updating of teachers, offering a guide to teaching the principles of Systemic and Planet-Centered Design that includes examples of exercises and best practices to be replicated with their students.
3. Through the implementation of the dissemination activities of the project to the citizens, Yourb is developing an evolving network of schools, institutions and associations that have adhered to the values on which the project is based and are engaged in their dissemination.
