Empowerment of Youth Through Design in Youth Initiatives

Abstract

Youth care in the Netherlands has faced quite some problems in the past years. It is organised only by adults who mostly have nothing to do with it, and it shows — both youth care workers and youth themselves have had enough. Every solution to the youth care problem in the Netherlands leads to new problems, making it a wicked problem which does not have one apparent solution which works. Therefore, the best solution to tackle it is to work with bottom-up organisations. De Garage2020 is such a bottom-up organisation, working in multidisciplinary teams all around the country to design innovations which focus on youth care prevention. They work together with youth to get to the best solutions, but unfortunately that still leaves a gap between them and youth they are designing for, especially because they themselves are adults and they still make the decisions. Therefore, de Garage2020 Rotterdam wants to start a new youth initiative, completely led and executed by youth: the JongerenGarage (translated to English as ‘Youth Garage’). The goal of the JongerenGarage would be to design for the utopian youth care in the Netherlands. This thesis is aimed on providing insight into how and if design can facilitate the empowerment of youth in youth initiatives. In this thesis, I am presenting a framework which shows the complex mechanisms that take place. Through this framework, concepts are presented, from which a prototype is developed and used as a case study of a trial youth initiative. This trial went differently than expected, which shows that the perception of what is good and what is bad differs between youth and adults, but also between a non-designer and a designer. Therefore, two things can be concluded: The first is that when designing for the empowerment of youth, an adult cannot expect youth to behave like adults. Youth go through several developmental phases and therefore may have a complete different view on what is right or wrong in terms of working and communication. Second, when conducting a diffuse design process, in which a designer enables others to co-design together, a designer cannot expect non-designers to go through the design process as the designer intended, as they have far less experience. All in all, both of these conclusions imply the same: Expectations have to be let go when designing for others’ processes. This can be done through constant reflection and self-awareness.