From the key dates for your diary to contact details, here’s everything you need to know.
What is it?
The Keeping Connected Design Challenge is a new initiative for Key Stage 3 students and teachers who are interested in helping to improve the way older adults connect to younger people, their community and the wider world by using service design and working with professional designers. There's a £5,000 prize for the school that designs the best service.
The outputs from the challenge will be used to inspire briefs that will be issued to industry through the Keeping Connected Industry Challenge.
Why are we doing this?
Many older adults are lonely and socially isolated - around 2.5 million people over 65 do not see a friend, neighbour or family member at least once a week. Yet, thanks to technology, young people have an incredible number of ways to stay in touch with each other, their families, communities and beyond. More importantly older adults express the view that contact with younger people is very important to their sense of wellbeing and connectedness with society as a whole. It is vital that we bridge the gap between younger people and older adults and re-think how we keep connected.
The Keeping Connected Design Challenge aims to bridge these generational gaps through service design; building stronger links between older adults and younger people.
What we aim to do
Working with practising designers, students will begin to understand how design can help to tackle this increasingly important social challenge and inspire a challenge to industry to develop technology and service based solutions.
Keeping Connected will bring together designers, older adults and younger people to gain a better understanding of the life experiences, needs, wishes and aspirations of older adults, as well as challenge stereotypes and ageist views.
It will help young people to use design principles, combining their tech-savvy approach with new knowledge about older adults, to create innovative services which better connect older adults to younger generations, their communities and the wider world.
Learning opportunity
The Keeping Connected Design Challenge aims to help students understand and address the issues which older adults can face and to challenge stereotypes and ageist views. The Challenge complements the National Curriculum and provides an exciting opportunity for the whole school. Pairing your school with a Design Ambassador will help and encourage students to use the design processes and creative thinking across the curriculum to solve an urgent problem.
It also presents a great opportunity to build links with both your local community and industry, helping to support wider curriculum requirements around community cohesion and cross-curricular dimensions.
Find out more on the Curriculum Links page.
How the Keeping Connected Design Challenge works
Each school that takes part will be partnered with a Design Ambassador who will guide them through a four step process towards designing a service that will support older adults in their community and help them to keep better connected.
Find out more about how it works on the Running the Challenge page.
School commitment
It will take a minimum of five days of curriculum time - between March and June 2011 - to deliver the Challenge to your team of selected students. It's up to your school whether you run the Challenge in curriculum time or as an extra-curricular activity, in a concentrated block or as shorter sessions over a number of weeks or months. We'd encourage you to use it as an opportunity to work in a cross-curricular way. Teachers from disciplines including Science, Geography and Design & Technology could all take part.
Students taking part
It's up to you how you pull together your design team of students. You could, for example, select a team of students from across year groups who want to use their creative thinking and innovation skills to come up with ways to develop solutions or deliver the Challenge to a whole year group.
Key dates
- Challenge goes live 16 March 2011
- School and Design Ambassador set up planning session by 31 March
- Final deadline for entries 15 June
- Final selected schools notified 17 June
- Final selection event 7 July (final five schools only)
Contact
For any questions or issues, you can get in touch at keepingconnecteddesignchallenge@designcouncil.org.uk