Presenting the GreenSCENT Guide to Youth Design Assemblies!
GreenSCENT has created a wealth of outcomes over its two-year existence that owe their high quality to the generous groups of European youths that took part in our Youth Design Assemblies.
At the inception of GreenSCENT we realized that engaging young people in shaping the future of education was paramount to our project. As researchers, educators, political actors, civil servants, and business leaders alike, we know that we are tasked with developing ideas, policies, and products that are relevant, inclusive, and help shape a sustainable future for generations to come, and we believed that creating these solutions without actively involving the voices of youth risked missing out on their unique insights and experiences.
It was to make it possible to tap into the wisdom of young people, that the GreenSCENT project developed and employed its novel methodology; the Youth Design Assembly. By combining tenets of Design Thinking and Deliberative Mini-Publics, this methodology has allowed youths to engage with, co-design and test the solutions developed by the partners in the GreenSCENT project, such as GreenSCENT’s Air Quality App GreenAIR and a Citizen Journalism web tool, improving on both the concept and the final product. As the GreenSCENT partners reflected:
The feedback received from YDA was extremely valuable for the development of CleanAir@School activity and tools. This helped in improving the material presented in the online YDA and improved the CleanAir@School app. – 4sfera
The YDA feedback played an important role in the future work on the skill cards drafts, as well as the development of the ECCEL certificate. – ECQA and CSRC
Engineering has taken the feedback from the Youth Design Assemblies very seriously, especially focusing on correcting the features and functions that users did not appreciate. – ENG
We love this method, and now you have the opportunity to use it too! We’ve written a simple how-to guide that lets you take the method and adapt it to your context.
Download the guide now and get started today: The Youth Design Assembly – Empowering Youth to Empower You
The Benefits of the Youth Design Assembly
The Youth Design Assembly method can help you:
- Deepen Your Understanding of the Target Group
- Develop and Improve Your Product – whether this is a material product, educational material or even policy
- Raise Interest and Motivation and Build Self-Efficacy
- Spark Action
- Build a Lasting Community
The benefits of using the method within the GreenSCENT project are outlined in more detail in the recently published book The European Green Deal in Education authored by the GreenSCENT partners and published by Routledge – specifically in chapter 8 titled “Youth Assemblies: Youth Engagement for Green Learning and Action.” Find the book here.
The guide has been authored by Democracy x, the partner responsible for the design and execution of the original Youth Design Assemblies, as well as the development of the methodology itself – with invaluable input from the GreenSCENT-consortium.