Designing for social transformation
Core practice
Community-engaged cultural artifacts and the practices and discourses they support.
Guiding Principle
A focus on allied political struggle to disrupt and transform power relations.
How does it look like in practice?—“The Occupied”
Youth processes cultural agency and the potential to critique, reimagine, and act on their social surroundings. In the classroom, students will create cultural artifacts that are responsive to community concerns and that are designed to catalyze particular social transformations toward justice.
Ms.J supported her students in imagining, designing, and building The Occupied, a light-up system to indicate when the classroom bathroom is occupied. Designed by students, it has three LED lights in a parallel circuit affixed to the wall outside the bathroom.
- Teachers and students gather their knowledge constructed through research and designed engineering artifacts that served as cultural interventions.
- Supporting students in making postcards that described their engineering designs, why they mattered, and their role in the process. These postcards were traded among students and were also shared with family and friends
- Teachers hosted community STEM events where families, friends, and students in other grade levels learned about the projects, talked with the student designers, and tested their projects.
“We call it ” The Occupied” because it’s supposed to show you when the bathroom is occupied…. I think this is a good problem to solve. I think it will help our community. Especially boys. The girls usually have someone watch the door, but a lot of us don’t.“
