Empowering young change-makers

Abstract

Children's participation in society is still limited without the establishment of appropriate areas, and the possibility to access the spheres of urban activism, children risks to remain invisible citizens. While children don't get the chance to unleash their creative talents in the innovation playground society is turning into, society lacks their contribution as playful and constructive disorganizers of the world. Based on those background premises, the current project focuses on exploring how children can participate in society without a top-down involvement and how they can be supported in the process of empowerment as active agents in their social and urban context. The opportunity for the project inquiry was found in collaboration with a children center in the outskirt of Bari (Italy), a frontrunner of the Urban civic networks project aimed at promoting urban and human regeneration in a neglected context, where the sense of powerlessness over positive transformations is handed down to children. A research through design approach was utilized to achieve the project goal: design a tool that enables 6 to 12 years old children to undertake an activation journey to take action towards prosocial challenges meaningful for themselves and their community. In the initial research cycle, desk research and comparative analysis of 6 different case studies of toolkit and programs were performed to unveil how children's empowerment could be supported by design. The resulting map of ideal empowering strategies allowed to identify some pillars of children activation process to inform the following cycles. Among those, the community perception, the unlocking of I can mindset and opportunities for action were the object of the research through design interventions, together with the open endedness of the activation process disclosed along with the two iterations. The insights collected converged into children's intuitive, creative activation journey, including gaps, enablers, and needs they experienced along it. They also contributed to enriching the requirements list for the tool's design. During the ideation the leading research outcomes were embodied in the final tool proposal "Il Priscio", activities set for young positive change-makers, that propose them a child-led activation through 5 main steps: raising I can, finding relevance in opportunities for change, becoming protagonists, powers-driven ideation and practicing courage. The tool suitcase board contains 14 activity cards with open-ended steps to perform and additional materials to support the experience, such as a platform to practice courage by sharing the results of the powers-driven ideation. The partial test of the tool in the context of the Urban civic network, set up as a third design intervention, acted as a launchpad for children self-activation. Although the implementation in the context of civic associations is envisioned, the tool opened up further research direction about children's self-esteem, the communicative potential of their imaginative interventions, constructive communication with policymakers, and the addition of levels of ambiguity to the tool journey.