A school class designs its mobility of the future
On Wednesday, October 23rd, 32 pupils didn’t go to school but joined the Urban Ideation Lab, the laboratory for the urban quarter of the future and the heart of B-Part Am Gleisdreieck. The 10th class of the Hermann-Hesse-Gymnasium in Berlin-Kreuzberg participated in the “TAKEpart”-Workshop, which was developed by the Lab Fellows RCKT and organized with the help of our our Urban Ideation Lab. What should the mobility of the future look like from the young people’s point of view, was the question – a crash course in design thinking.
Let’s start with one result: The students felt that the adult workshop leaders were all competent and qualified. Also, the math and physics teacher of the class had compliments to give and described it after the workshop as follows: “It was great to see that the class stayed concentrated all the time despite fewer breaks,” says Till Scharp.
The topic of the workshop, in which everything revolved around the mobility of young people in the city, certainly contributed to this. Many of them see major problems here, for example concerning safety in trains and buses or when cycling. The workshop aimed to start from personal experiences and to explore possibilities for improvement.
Methodologically, the workshop was based on so-called design thinking, i.e. the approach of precisely grasping problems from the user’s point of view and deriving corresponding ideas and solutions from them. Lara-Marie Nöh, Anna-Stephanie Gurt and Paula Alexander – Lab Fellow Team RCKT – used “Design Dash”, a compressed form of design thinking.
The students experienced a completely different kind of school day, in which they slipped into the role of product developers and created mobility apps that meet their needs and the future of mobility in the city in general. At first the six working groups developed a “persona”, a fictitious character as a starting point for the next work phases. One persona, for example, sums up her mobility experience as follows: “I would like to travel more by train. But I don’t always feel safe and sometimes uncomfortable. It would be better if more staff were on the move.”
In the second phase, Design Dash, the students prioritized the various problem areas and worked out a common story map as the basis for the app to be developed. This was followed by prototyping and finally the presentation of the hand-drawn app interfaces with their respective functional logic. For example, concepts for bicycle apps called “Bike Saver” or “Road Teller” were presented. A nice “learning experience” was that the ubiquitous smartphone apps are not just perceived as users. Instead, you go into the developer’s perspective and experiment with ideas as to how the apps could look, which are specifically tailored to your own experiences and circumstances in urban traffic. “At RCKT, as a digital agency and consultancy, we conduct very similar workshops in business using the same method,” explains the Lab Fellow Team. “As a rule, we do this with experienced managers. Today we tested the method with a school class for the first time. In comparison, the students did not do any worse. They thought very openly and developed great ideas. For example, a “security on demand” service for the subway or a game concept with networked passengers who simultaneously weave a kind of safety net among themselves during the game and playfully break up the anonymity that otherwise prevails.”
To come back to the above-mentioned evaluation of the adults by the teenagers: “It is not disrespectful at all if we are happy that the school class perceived us as competent”, explains the RCKT team. “Because whether managers or pupils, we always regard the workshop participants as our customers. And the goal is of course that our program is well received by customers, no matter how old they are”.