Brief description

Via Students Learning With Communities (SLWC), teams of students engage with an underserved organisation (e.g. a charity) to identify problems to solve. They then undertake a design process to propose new products, services or system interventions to address these problems. For example, students have engaged with Friends of the Elderly to improve the retail experience of a charity shop, to streamline and improve the volunteer experience and to create new avenues for older people in the community to engage with the organisation. More recently, students worked with PACE, a social enterprise that creates employment opportunities for ex-prisoners. Students created designs for new products that PACE’s workers could make and sell. Other teams in the class designed a new mobile coffee cart for the organisation. Liaising with the client and other stakeholders is a key aspect of the projects.

How does this align to the Curriculum Shaper(s)?

This is a live, real-world project where students develop important professional practice skills that are difficult to realise in projects that are purely classroom-based. When asked about the experience afterwards, students communicate passionately and speak about transformative perspective shifts related to both the marginalised groups they have worked with – and the power of their own product design discipline.

Future directions

As we continue to work with a variety of underserved community organisations, we aim to disseminate the work in a more meaningful way, e.g. through exhibitions on campus. Our programme is also investigating work placements – and larger projects modelled on this one (full-time over a semester) is an avenue we aim to explore in full.

One piece of advice

Firstly, staff should engage with SLWC to understand the process. Lecturers should then liaise with the community partner to develop a project and to manage the expectations of the partner. Finding the balance between student learning outcomes and the partner’s real-world needs can be a challenge – but having gone through this process once, lecturers should find it very straightforward and extremely rewarding.