Yonsei - INDEX Design to Improve Life Summer School

It is the mission of the Yonsei - INDEX: Design to Improve Life Summer School to educate the next generations of global citizens and leaders in an experience-oriented, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, international and integrated learning environment.

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YONSEI - INDEX: DESIGN TO IMPROVE LIFE SUMMER SCHOOL

Vision

Mission

Objective

Over the course of five years it is the vision to establish the globally most sought after summer university, based on the thinking of Design to Improve Life.

It is the mission of the INDEX: Yonsei Summer University to educate the next generations of global citizens and leaders in an experience-oriented, crossdisciplinary, cross-cultural, international and integrated learning environment. The learning process will give the students the methodology to understand large scale challenges and the tools to be part of solving these. The methodology and tools are derived from the user-focused, creative design thinking that lays in the foundation of Design to Improve Life.

It is the objective of the INDEX: Yonsei Summer University to give each student a unique and life lasting learning experience fostering engagement, creativity and courage to play a crucial role in the future.

Scale 200-300 students in classes of 20-30 students and teams of 4-8 students.

YIDSS is open for high school seniors, graduates and undergraduates from universities all over the world and is relevant to students from all desciplines.

Duration Four weeks, 1.-29. July, 2011.

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INDEX: Design to Improve Life is concerned with the areas of Body, Home, Work, Play and Community. Horizontal categories spanning the entire human life all over the world.

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Prepare Perceive Prototype Produce

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examples of design to improve life

Keep the change

The killer in the kitchen

WhalePower

In America, women were reported to not build up savings, which puts them in a vulnerable position. Based on design thinking IDEO designed a new financial service for Bank of America.

World Health Organization estimates approximately 1.6 million deaths per year – and among these 800.000 children - from conditions prompted by the toxic fumes of indoor cooking with wood or other ‘bio-mass’ fuels.

WhalePower Tubercle Technology offers retrofitted blades for wind turbines that increase efficiency and performance while reducing noise.

Every time you buy something with Visa debit card from Bank of America, the bank rounds up your purchase to the nearest dollar and transfers the difference from your checking to your savings account.

Since the launch, 2.5 million customers have signed up for Keep the Change and 99% have stayed with it.

Design: IDEO Palo Alto, California USA

The Chulha is a stove designed to limit the dangerous health conditions caused by traditions of indoor cooking in many rural areas of the developing world. The IP of the stove is being made available by Philips Design to the world of social entrepreneurs so they can — free of charge — produce the stove themselves and generate local business, while helping counter the killer in the kitchen.

Design: Philips Design Eindhoven, the Netherlands/ Pune, India

Inspired by the flippers of humpback whales, the design addresses the fundamental limitations of conventional aerodynamic performance such as instability of supply and power generation as a result of poor wind. These “tubercles” keep air attached to the blades, preventing it from falling off the tips. This flow management increases lift while greatly reducing stall and noise.

The tubercled fan blades move 25 percent more air with 20 percent less power. Tubercled turbines will spin more electricity from water, steam, gas, or wind, while tubercled fans, pumps, and compressors will use much less energy. Human-designed tubercles will cut demand for fossil fuels and economies can grow yet reduce the damage done.

Design: Dr. Laurens Howle Durham, North Carolina, United States.

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Design is the human capacity to shape and make our environments in ways that satisfy our needs and give meaning to our lives. / John Heskett

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THE THEME

RELEVANT SOLUTION DESIGN

PERSONAL RELEVANCE

UN MILLENNIUM GOALS

DESIGN TO IMPROVE LIFE

Design is the human capacity to shape and make our environments in ways that satisfy our needs and give meaning to our lives. It is something we all do and from that outset, some of us train further at schools and become designers.

Design processes may be described in mystical terms and referred to with a lot of confusion, but it is neither the Beast in Revelations nor is it the answer to all problems facing the human race. Design processes are creative and efficient way of working that identifies solutions based on the knowledge, responsiveness and methodology of designers. These processes are far too important and useful to be used only by designers and is therefore now in demand worldwide as solution-finding processes for all innovative professions and industries.

Design to Improve Life is when you combine design and design processes and apply them to address challenges to human life and welfare. Design to Improve Life contrary to traditional design is not only assessed due to its form, materials, colors and surfaces, but as importantly due to its scale of positive improvement in important areas of people’s lives and due to how well it fits the context, culture, ethics and geography of where it is supposed to be used.

Design to Improve Life can be tangible or intangible as in system design, process design and service design.

But sheer process and methodology without substantial content is not lively, engaging and integrated learning.

The students of the INDEX: Yonsei Summer University will be engaged in understanding the thinking, knowledge, processes, methodology and potential in Design to Improve Life and by that the overall frame of the Summer University will be established.

During the process, the students will distill The United Nations Millennium Development Goals from abstraction into less overarching challenges that are relevant to their own lives. This will be done through cross-disciplinary teams where design innovation and creative solutions to the challenges will be developed.

Therefore, the students of the INDEX: Yonsei Summer University will gain their understanding of the thinking, knowledge, processes, methodology and potential in Design to Improve Life whilst engaging in a design process themselves.

The focus of the student’s design process will be The United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

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As a YIDSS student, you will gain ∙ Reflective collaboration

...in international, cross-disciplinary teams while focusing on designing solutions to highly complex challenges

∙ Knowledge and understanding...

...of how design thinking and methodologies can improve life for people all over the world - and be the basis of problem solving in all professions

∙ Methods and tools... ...to

identify and explore complex challenges and transform these into manageable and defined tasked with relevance to you

∙ Knowledge and experience...

...with user centered and user driven processes and tolls to research by design

∙ Creative and visual competences...

...to develop new ideas and shape the best ideas into solutions that improve life for people

∙ Process understanding...

...and knowledge about communication and experience with process facilitation

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Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger Achieve universal primary education Promote gender equality and empower women Reduce child mortality Improve maternal health Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases Ensure environmental sustainability Develop a Global Partnership for Development

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The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) form a blueprint agreed upon by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest, focusing on freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom to live in dignity – and by that survival and coexistence for humanity.

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Goal 1 Eradicate extreme

poverty and hunger Goal 2 Achieve universal

primary education Goal 3 Promote gender equality

and empower women Goal 4 Reduce child mortality Goal 5 Improve maternal health Goal 6 Combat HIV/AIDS,

malaria and other diseases Goal 7 Ensure environmental sustainability Goal 8 Develop a Global Partner ship for Development .................................

As a sub-frame for transferring understanding of Design to Improve Life, the MDGs form a unique opportunity to address a variety of different issues from education to health, from sustainability to equality and development of global partnership addressing our common future.

These issues are relevant across disciplines, across cultures and across faculty/schools and the global society share all needed knowledge on an open source basis.

But the main reason for choosing the MDGs as a sub-frame for INDEX: Yonsei Summer University is that young people are oftentimes searching for purpose in life that largely respond to some of the world’s pressing challenges and where they might play an important role.

The MDGs offer precisely that.

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THE CURRICULUM

The Yonsei - INDEX: Design to Improve Life Summer School (YIDSS) consists of: ∙ Design to Improve Life Legacy Course (comprises 200 minutes of classes four days a week each class) ∙ Elective courses relating to Design to Improve Life ∙ Inspiring fieldtrips ∙ Evening lectures by inter- nationally renowed speakers Apart from this each student must expect homework and work assignments outside of normal classes, in subject teams and on an individual basis.

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The curriculum has four phases and is planned as an interaction between experience-oriented, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, international and integrated learning activities in the classroom, project work (in the classroom or as homework), field work and summing up in class after each phase.

The summer university is built around the design process and takes place in an interaction between activities in the full INDEX: legacy group of 200-300 students, theme classes of 20-30 students and subject teams within the thematic classes of 4-8 students.

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Each of the four phases corresponds to one of four phases in the design process: Prepare, Perceive, Prototype, and Produce.

In between the four phases is a “Sum up, Learn and Continue” phase, comprised of lectures by international guest teachers, reflection activities and social activities for all attending students and faculty.

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THE Prepare Phase (Week 1) Know and plan what you are doing.

Understand the expectations and the tasks you face.

Be sure that the team understands the tasks.

Agree who leads the process – and how.

Build on optimism and expectations of success.

The PREPARE PHASE is comprised of an initial introduction, presentation and social evening where all students and all faculties are introduced to each other in order to establish a group feeling.

The following morning, a full day of introductions to Design to Improve Life and MDGs by world leading international guest lecturers will take place to lay the foundation for the coming work.

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What do the students learn?

How do they learn this?

During the PREPARE PHASE, the students learn to prepare, assess, and plan long-term projects and processes. They learn to create cross-functional teams, to define different roles and responsibilw i-ties in a project group, match expectations and work on common ground. They are purposely trained to screen large fields of study, to identify complex problems and to structure large amounts of information. They learn to ask questions — many questions — to open up; they learn to prioritize and to make ideas concrete, summarizing along the way based on the knowledge they have obtained and on the feedback they have received on their completed work.

In the PREPARE PHASE, the students are introduced to design, design processes and the “Design to Improve Life” way of thinking.

After the introduction, the students create the cross-functional teams that they will work in throughout the entire summer university. The students then go through a process where they distill the MDGs into less abstract challenges relevant to themselves, and from there they describe the challenge they want to address.

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Finally, the PREPARE PHASE is summed up and the students give and receive feedback on the work they have done.

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THE Perceive Phase (Week 2) Gain Understanding.

Find what you need to know, be rigorous in research and knowledge based.

Talk to, observe and understand the users.

Find inspiration and assess what is already out there.

The PERCEIVE PHASE starts with an evening of international lectures focusing on the PERCEIVE PHASE in a design process. The lectures are followed by a a social event for all students and faculty.

Our world is shaped and accommodated to fit our different needs.

Different people of different ages in different parts of the world have very different needs. One of the most important aspects of the design process is to understand the assignment and its potential users and target groups. What are their needs and wishes? And what issues need to be solved with the design?

The PERCEIVE PHASE focuses mainly on Context: What surroundings, challenges and needs are relevant for the design? Which people are affected by the problem in question? How are they affected? And what is the culture, geography, infrastructure, etc. like where the design is needed?

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What do the students learn?

How do they learn this?

During the PERCEIVE PHASE, the students learn to understand and describe the challenge they identified in the PREPARE PHASE. They learn to identify and examine which target groups the solution/design is relevant for. They learn to research, based on user-centered methods and to find inspiration and knowledge.

By focusing on the specific target groups and users whose lives are affected by the prevailing challenges or themes, the students are able to learn and understand which expectations and tasks they are facing. The students learn to be open and receptive to new understandings, and to “a-ha� experiences that will move them. They learn to ask both open-ended and steering closed questions and they learn to focus the knowledge they have gathered on their work.

The students start by preparing their research and fieldwork related to the challenge chosen in the PREPARE PHASE: Which questions will they need to ask, and who do they need to ask?

Afterwards, they do field work to collect the information needed and then they process the input.

On the basis of this work, the students work out a project description which will be the main document for their work.

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THE Prototype phase (WEEK 3) Get many ideas, build them, visualize them and show them, test them, test them again and have fun, while you remember the users and communicate within the team.

Make the process time-intensive.

The PROTOTYPE PHASE starts with an evening of international lectures focusing on the PROTOTYPE PHASE of a design process.

The lectures are followed by a social event for all students and faculty.

Generating new ideas, testing them, discarding several, generating new ideas, testing them, and refining the best is central in the design process. The ideas need to be visualized, modeled, built, drawn, cut, folded, or glued.

And they need to be tested by users again and again and again.

The PROTOTYPE PHASE focuses mainly on Form, what can be felt, touched and seen— materials, color, texture, context, esthetics, etc.

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What do the students learn?

How do they learn this?

During the PROTOTYPE PHASE, the students learn to study and visualize many possible solutions by designing simple models and prototypes and by choosing and refining the very best solutions.

The solutions can have many shapes and sizes. For example, the students can design an equality information campaign, a new education service, or a health care product.

As an introduction to the design work, the students go through an exercise that teaches them how to solve specific exercises with design.

By using the strongest of all design competences — the ability to visualize — the students learn to see the challenge they identified during the first two modules from all angles, and they try to come up with possible solutions to the challenge. This phase is where the students “finally” get to start working with what most people consider DESIGN, but what in reality is only a part of the design process. .................................

After the introduction, the groups continue designing the problem they have chosen to work on. For example, a chosen challenge could be the MDG 7 – Ensure Environmental Sustainability - and it has been distilled into the challenge of ‘How to design an innovative and engaging system of recycling at the Yonsei International Campus?’

The student teams will then build many different model solutions, including an overview of campus, different design solutions and visualizations, test the solutions with users, choose the best, finish building the model, then continue on to PRODUCE PHASE 4 where the whole process is completed.

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The Produce Phase (Week 4) Produce.

Launch.

Distribute.

Communicate.

Realize.

Share.

The PRODUCE PHASE starts with an evening of international lectures focusing on the PRODUCE PHASE of a design process. The lectures are followed by a social event for all students and faculty.

One of the greatest challenges in working with modern design processes and “Design to Improve Life” is creating a design that makes a difference. One of the first steps to achieving this is to focus determinedly on presentation and communication.

PRODUCE PHASE focuses mainly on the problem’s strengths and weaknesses compared to the three parameters — Impact, Context, and Form — in accordance with the way the INDEX:Award jury judges nominated design projects.

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What do the students learn?

How do they learn this?

During the PRODUCE PHASE, the students learn to complete their work. They learn to assess and evaluate their own and each other’s work in relation to the learning and development process and to compare this to specific results and solutions they have come up with during the course.

The first thing the students learn in the PRODUCE PHASE is to work on narrating a good story about their design and the design process they have gone through. Afterwards, the project groups focus on preparing their final assignment and on the presentation of this assignment. In the end, the entire lesson plan is evaluated.

The students are given the opportunity to acquire methods and tools to present and communicate their work and to analyze and evaluate the processes and results as a whole.

The PRODUCE PHASE ends with an examination during which the students presents their learning process, the output of the four phases and their solutions.

The students learn to give and receive feedback on the work they have done.

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INDEX: Design to Improve Life is concerned with the areas of Body, Home, Work, Play and Community. Horizontal categories spanning the entire human life all over the world.

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Form is concerned with color, material, esthetics and surfaces. It is what you can touch and feel, as such, Form is what has traditionally been perceived as the concern of design.

Impact is about the positive effect of a design. The importance of the challenge it addresses, how well it improves life, it’s possible distribution, its relevance, and the social, economic and environmental sustainability of the design. Impact is about how and what the design can improve.

Context is about the setting in which a design is proposed to function. It’s about how a design fits the culture, geography, ethics in the society in which it’s intended to be used.

Context is concerned with Life.

Form Impact Context

– Design – to improve – life