Design can positively contribute towards the highly complex social, economic and environmental problems we face today. One key area in design for social change is to empower citizens to activate change that disrupts built-in systemic inequalities and exploitative practices. This workshop presents the ‘Action Heroes Journey’, a resource kit co-developed by designers and CitizensUK community organisers to enable active citizen participation in public life. Based on Joseph Campbell’s (2008) Hero’s Journey storytelling framework, the toolkit integrates methods from service design and community organising and is aimed to help users to discover and align their personal values with the future development of their community. Although the resource was co-designed with and for young people initially, the archetypal structure allows the embedding of vernacular goals and meanings – i.e. increasing leadership, participation and co-creation that is meaningful at a personal level. It also connects with other stakeholder’s priorities, for example, NGOs and local government citizen and sustainability strategies. Participants will learn how service design can be used to develop creative leadership capacity and enhancing wider and more diverse engagement in the socio-political sphere.
History
School
Loughborough University London
Published in
ServDes 2020, Tensions, Paradoxes + Plurality. Proceedings of the ServDes.2020 Conference
Pages
633-641
Source
ServDes 2020, Tensions, Paradoxes + Plurality
Publisher
Linköping University Electronic Press
Version
VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This paper was published in the ServDes.2020 Tensions, Paradoxes and Plurality Conference Proceedings. The definitive published version is available at https://ep.liu.se/en/conference-article.aspx?series=ecp&issue=173&Article_No=82