Design Thinking in a Social Context

Tailored to your organization’s or students’ needs, the Cultural Design Marathon is a design sprint in which participants use the design process to identify and solve problems that matter to them. Problems can be posed by organizational leaders or can be selected by participants and sprints can last anywhere from 4 hours to 3 months depending on the goals of the organization.

The Cultural Design Marathon utilizes design thinking and the design process through a series of tailored facilitation prompts geared at allowing participants to:

-have a rich and systemic inquiry into the history and context of problem areas

-generate solutions/concepts to address those problem areas

-create a plan for testing and prototyping solutions with the appropriate stakeholders

Creating using expertise from intergroup dialogue and engineering education, the science behind the facilitation of a Cultural Design Marathon is tailored to ensure engagement from all participants.

Facilitation of a Cultural Design Marathon draws from the following work:

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed

• Liberation Coaching

• Participatory Action Research

• Human-Centered Design