Design is seen by some not just as a professional skill but a basic human competence. It has been said that many actual social problems can be improved if approached with a design attitude. "Design for social change" is a sentence that one can hear more and more. It seems to be the solution for every social problem, from proverty to pollution. However, in order to be effective as a means for social change, a certain critical mass of citizens with the corresponding competences, skills and abilities as design thinkers are needed.
Tha's why it seems to me that this initiative by Studio H, in the poorest rural county in the USA, contains important lessons. The team led by Emile Pilloton seems to have applied a holistic design thinking approach to the reality of Bertie county. In so doing, they are using it as a prototype for what can become a wider waver of change. They started to work on the education system there and move outward from it towards the rest of the society. This is a very interesting and in som moments a very moving video that explains their project.
I find specially remarkable that they recovered manual work as a way to teach to think as a designer. It is related to some of the lessons of using actual physical prototypes not only to express your ideas but to think about what you want to do, about the difficulties around a given problem. Interestingly enough, it is also about cooperating with others in problem solving by actually "touching" the prototype of the problem.
The project in Bertie County was addressed to high-school students but other initiatives teach design thinking at an earlier age, like this initiative of the Stanford Design Institute that proposes a design thinking curriculum for K-12 kids. Their website is full of materials and ideas to use in class.
