Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn

This week, we have been absorbing some of the feedback given to us during our week in St.Stephen’s Green; part of Innovation Dublin. As a result of this, all of the projects are now being reviewed. Some are going back to their roots; while others are going to have to change significantly. It’s all a process of evolution.

The latter part of the week was spent preparing for prototyping and presenting the projects in Clongriffin. Prototypes were centered around validating the projects with Clongriffin residents; finding out what they think of them. Friday was the deadline for moving the Designing Dublin office to Clongriffin. It was a rush to the finish and there wasn’t much time to share what each group was prototyping. In the end we made it across the line around 6pm.

» Ken

During this week we reflected on all of the learning’s taken from our week at 15 Stephen’s Green. By interacting and collaborating with the people who visited us, we were able to gather a wide variety of fascinating and abstract ideas.

It was exciting to see the amount of interest we had acquired from the outside world! Our promotion of the event worked well; and that in itself was really encouraging. We had massive amounts of useful information given to us by outsiders. A term Vanessa used to help us along was ‘Rummage in the trash can, find what’s useful and put it together’ — very inspiring.

We had two talks with two really great guys during this week also. First up was Declan Hayden, an integration officer from Dublin City Council. He gave us a great insight into how important it was to include all members of the community and this reminded us to ensure we hadn’t forgotten about the diverse nature of Clongriffin itself!

The second speaker was Ré Dubhthaigh, of radarstation. Ré shared some wonderful examples of design thinking which really was cool! Really encouraging to hear from someone who believes in our work and could offer us some really valuable feedback.

Overall we it was a great experience. The only complaint being that we had to repeat ourselves constantly! However, this did teach us to cut out the less important stuff and narrow down our projects into clear and concise points of explanation. This was a great learning as it really helped us to get better at explaining our ideas.

» Sarah