Resumen de Co-designing and Making - Experiences from the project
The aim of the project We Design & Make was to engage 8th-grade students in a collaborative, open-ended design and making project. Craft is part of the Finnish National Curriculum, and this project combined traditional textile craft practices, human-centered co-design, and the new e-textile technology to support students in learning new important future skills, such as collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and empathy.
Through combining aspects from connected learning theories to structures of the craft curriculum, this project offered students experiences of purposeful co-designing and making in collaboration with the local preschoolers. The project was built around human-centered design theories and methods; it also built a bridge between school and the surrounding society. The strategy of this experimental project was to test different co-designing methods, to support student agency, sense of purpose, and empathy skills, as well as to examine and study these elements.
