Valentina Auer

Due to my role as student ambassador I got the opportunity to work for the 2020 summer school as "super ambassador" for the school of architecture and design. The summer school aims to introduce year 12 students to university, especially targeted to students who have migration background or come from families with no academic experience so far. They get information about how to apply for university, what the life as a student feels and looks like and how to make their decision of what course and what university to choose easier. They get the opportunity to work on a subject of their interest for one week and experience what it would be like to study in this particular field. With the impact of COVID-19 this year's summer school took place online and the participants could choose more than one subject if they were interested. Through a chat function on the homepage they were in touch with the ambassadors and could ask questions about the tasks for the week and university in general. I used this opportunity to introduce the students who were interested into design to the first steps of a product design process, mapping. Through a short presentation and some research material I provided for them they could gain more knowledge about design thinking, mapping, the complexity of design problems and how a good and sustainable designer takes advantage of these problems. 

The design task asked the students to pick a simple object in their room. Then they should observe it and create a map about the object including everything that comes to their mind and what they observed about it. Finally they had to define categories which are related to design, like usability, material, aesthetic and improvements for the object within the map. They visualised the complexity of the "simple" object and could observe through this task what product design includes and how important it is for a designer to see the whole system rather than only the aesthetics of something. The students showed a high interest into design and the exercise and even asked for more research material about mapping, design thinking and complexity. 

The task will be used in the game as a simplified version for younger children and with less focus on product design. Therefore the summer school can be seen as a test version for one part of the game.