CASE STUDY: CO-CREATING FOR CULTURAL RESONANCE

CULTURAL RESONANCE THROUGH DESIGN

I partner with organizations and educational institutions and facilitate design workshops that provide a setting for co-creation. In tis partnership the objective was to co-create with real clients for activating social and environmental change by designing educational tools. These were a series of studios where I partnered with different schools: The Berkeley Turkish School, and The Berkeley School. The first partnership was with The Berkeley Turkish school, where the studio’s goal was to co-create educational tools to teach culture through creativity. The second partnership was with The Berkeley School where the objective was to co-create educational tools to discover the native cultures that lived in the Bay Area.

CHALLENGE:

How might we co-design culturally resonant educational tools?

SOLUTION:

For each studio, I created a customized design thinking workshop curriculum that included design thinking and research methodology instruction that was paired with hands-on activities with co-creation sessions with partners to meet the goals of our partners.

IMPACT:

• Leading collaborative design studios provided real client experiences for the industrial design students

• The students, teachers and parents in the partner organizations were able to take part in design thinking and the co-creating sessions of the educational tools they used.

• Created an innovation framework for design education for cultural resonance for the partner schools.

WHAT PEOPLE SAY

“I had the wonderful opportunity to take Basak’s Industrial Design Studio class during my junior year. In it we worked with the Berkeley Turkish School to design educational games. It was a wonderful experience to actually go to the school, conduct research and test the prototypes of games we made with the students all in a semester. She does a fantastic job at pushing her students to improve their weaknesses and polish their strengths. Basak has always been a joy to talk to in and out of the classroom, she really helped me see the empathetic side of design.”

- Sajan Saini- Industrial Designer, Fellow

“I attended Basak's Industrial Design studio during the Spring 2017 at California College of the Arts . The studio focused on sustainable product design, practiced by myself and fellow classmates while working to create a series of toys for the Berkeley Turkish School.

Basak challenged each of her students to expand unique designs while focusing on product outcomes. She made sure the studio worked with teachers at BTS, conducting interviews and testing mockups to perfect our designs and achieve a desired outcome that Incorporated aspects of sustainable design learned in the studio, Referenced ties to Turkish culture and Worked seamlessly into the curriculum and real life limitations at BTS. I would recommend the studio to industrial design students serious about pushing their projects through a subjective lens of honest feedback and criticism.

Basak teaches students to not only listen and work with clients, but to also be unafraid and brave while testing a variety of designs with a target market. Basak's ID4: Sustainability class represents a rare opportunity for students to deliver a unique product concept shaped by research and real time critical feedback. “

-Hugo Waldern, Industrial Designer