Conflict and its collective resolution apply to each of our families and all of our communities, especially in these times of pandemics and politics. Each of us carries trauma from our own lives and that of generations before us. Our workshop is an opportunity to explore creative and interactive methods of rage and reconciliation, resentment, and resilience. Our workshop will center around community building through story-telling. We will begin with introductions of each participant and explain the origins of ReGeneración (www.regeneracion.co) as a movement for the empowerment of those who have been invisibilized for generations. We will then discuss our children’s book project and form small groups to act out “sociodramas”, spontaneous performances that challenge us to utilize all parts of ourselves to identify, confront, and resolve conflicts within our environment. Our workshop is meant to be collaborative as each of us are experts in our story. Welcome. Bienvenid@.

In the summer of 2020, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign decided to mend decades of mistrust from the local community & worked closely with city stakeholders to establish the “Campus-Community Compact”, an initiative that brings together members of the community with campus partners to collectively rethink & rebuild our shared city. We will share in this session how we’ve leveraged human-centered design to work towards our objectives & discuss issues around the pace of systemic change & the challenges of working with a large group of diverse stakeholders. Though we have been working on this for two years, we are still early in the process & will be seeking feedback & guidance on ways to improve our participatory design techniques.

This session explores an equity-based approach to technology-rich learning under development in collaboration with the Digital Harbor Foundation. This approach was initially created for designing learning experiences for youth in urban contexts but is expanding to include other populations. Together we will explore how we can engage participants of diverse ages & abilities in their own place-based projects.

How do our relationships shape the way we learn, move, and participate in the world around us? How do formal and informal learning environments influence our capacity to create, play, and fall further into ourselves? In this participatory session, we’ll explore our own relationships to better understand our most fruitful, generative, and safe learning environments. Participants will then work together to collectively ideate ways in which they might share and replicate these modes of relationships in and outside the classroom.

What does research show about how different ages and other social groups attach meaning to designed things? How might our social locations affect the boundaries we create to separate or integrate various parts of our lives such as work and family? After a brief lecture where sociologist Michelle Janning shares her research findings on technology, boundaries, and objects, attendees will workshop their own meaning-making processes, with a particular emphasis on boundaries between public and private life realms. Part of the exercise will entail sharing ideas about how life stages may impact these boundaries.

Integrating human-centered design in existing higher education courses is challenging. One opportunity can be to support students in using human-centered design to complete community placement assignments that are required in some existing Social Sciences and Humanities curriculum. In this session, we will share and discuss with participants lessons learned from integrating human-centered design in community placement assignments of three existing courses at UIUC: an education for social justice course, an English education methods course, and a language for health professions course.

Facilitating learning environments where children engage with developing human-centered design requires instructors to prioritize and support authentic, problem-based, and collaborative learning experiences. In this session we will describe an afterschool where 3rd – 6th grade learners worked on a design challenge. We will then analyze the aspects of the learning environment that supported their engagement with complex design concepts. The goal of this session is to discuss strategies that can support practitioners in designing similar learning experiences as they facilitate the learning of complex human-centered design concepts in diverse learning environments.