Design Ignites Change
The final project of my course last semester challenged the students to identify a social issue in their community and address it through the design of a product or service. One of the two project teams selected bullying as their issue. They interviewed middle school students and counselors as part of their research, learning about how bullying is currently handled in the schools.
Bullying is a misunderstood issue that negatively affects the behavior of most students, leading to poor performance and decreased self-esteem. We want to empower students to report, mediate or avert bullying in middle schools. Traditional anti-bullying programs are structured so that students must make a physical trip to a main office to report to an adult about bullying. Discovering that bullying often goes unreported because students are hesitant to make that trip or share their experiences with adults, we offer in our project a discreet means of reporting and a virtual peer support system for students who may be victims of bullying.
They designed and prototyped a web-based social network focused on peer-support, confidence building, and unintrusive monitoring by the counselor. The project schedule was only a few weeks, so the final deliverable was a presentation of their concept, but the team did go so far as to get feedback from the same faculty they had interviewed at the beginning. The response was favorable, and they had good suggestions for improving it.
My students decided to enter the project in the Design Ignites Change Idea Awards.
In each award cycle one award of $1,000 and up to two at $500 each will be given to innovative project ideas that have the ability to ignite positive social change. Projects will also be highlighted on the Design Ignites Change website and promoted through the program’s PR efforts.
You can read more about their project, named Be!, on the Design Ignites Change website.
