FAREWELL 2020–21 ACADEMIC YEAR
It has been an incredibly active school year for KUGA despite the pandemic. As a team, we found new ways to come together, work together and share what we do with our community. From KUGA Talks and blog posts to team workshops and events and to the design thinking process, 2020–2021 year has been very insightful and full of surprises to say the least. While it was extremely challenging to do what we do on online platforms, since most of our work depends on human interaction, we were still able to persist through such a hard time and put out work that we are proud of. It is the compassionate and understanding yet still resilient mindset that allowed us to persevere yet another online school term. It is fair to say that this team’s individuals’ sincere passion kept us together despite everything that has been going on around us. All things considered, we wanted to take a look at what we did in our design thinking process this year within the groups of gender inequality, environment and human rights, respectively.
Gender Inequality;
Before focusing on the issues and target groups, the idea that the project would consist of certain stages was something we had in common. That’s why, we divided our project into stages and focused on things separately. For instance, at one of our meetings, we focused on the issues that different target groups face, which was our main focus for some time. Because, for us, the most important thing is for our projects to be sustainable and determining the target group for a project is very important for the project to be able to be long-term, especially in pandemic circumstances. The fact that our project can be understood and implemented by other schools and groups is a very crucial step to make a change in society in terms of the issues we are talking about such as gender inequality. Due to the pandemic identifying target groups was more important in terms of reaching them. After identifying different target groups, we drew attention to the issues that varied between these groups. We discussed the different gender issues that we see in our daily lives, and media such as inequalities in workplaces, sexual health, sexual violence, sexual identity, stereotypes, patriarchal society, employment, etc. We thought about the needs of these people, which is why we focused on the main issues that are seen in these different target groups. After talking about the issues, our goal was to find the right project. Therefore, we wrote down every idea that came up to our minds and we tried to increase these ideas so it was easier to choose from. We thought about different challenges, seminars, or platforms to conduct our project. At one of our meetings, we examined the results of certain studies that we found through media, such as one of the Harvard Business reviews, that attracted our attention. Nowadays, social media is one of the most popular and usable platforms which can help us run our project faster and in a lasting way. Because of the pandemic, popular social media platforms such as Instagram and Tiktok make our work easier during this period, in terms of raising awareness and promoting our work when meeting people face to face is difficult. As a result, using such platforms gives us a huge opportunity to keep connecting with people, as well as keep our motivation high by feeling the existence of a community we feel like we belong to. While we kept on considering different target groups as our focus, we came to the conclusion that we could start building our project around university students, since they are more accessible considering the pandemic and we thought it would give us a good headstart as we try to build the different steps of the project and we are very excited for it to come to life.
Environment;
We need a clean environment for our future. It is essential for healthy living and a sustainable ecosystem. According to UN Sustainable Development Goals Number 13, climate action and environmental consciousness are needed for a better future. As the group environment, we got together to discuss the different environmental problems varying from water population to global warming to drought… We tried to implement the steps of design thinking on how we approach the process. The first step was empathizing, in which we tried to share what kind of environmental crises we face in our lives seeking to understand the different sides of the problem. As a group with members from different disciplines, we had fruitful debates. By creating a balloon full of points about environmental challenges, we got a general and collective idea on how we can continue. We chose to focus on waste production and management. While concentrating on how to avoid waste production, the second step of design thinking started. During the defining stage, our group members developed ideas on where we should start to find a solution. The main points that we agreed on were raising awareness on conscious waste management, being able to keep track of the social impact of our solution, and providing a sustainable project plan. University students were determined to be our target group as we know how to communicate with them. Starting to follow a path to a solution, we started to ideate a possible project with the next step of the design thinking journey. By exchanging ideas within the group, we started examining the possibility of a waste-free camp. As we were coming to the end of the term, our focus was on designing the most impactful waste-free camp plan that we interviewed with possible partners in the field and Koc University Social Impact Form. At the end of the term, we agreed to continue working on our project during the summer. It was an informative, challenging, and enjoyable process for us. We are looking forward to making our project real!
Human Rights;
As the Human Rights team, the first thing that we did was to evaluate and advance insights that we acquired from previous Human Rights interviews. After that, our question forming session started and we had no intentions to stop until we had enough problems to form firing questions with. We did not stick to one theme; we generated sub-themes that also contain anything closely or remotely related to human rights. We assessed every single insight and decided to separate them into headings. Those were “Education” “Right Awareness” “Preconception” “Norms of the Society”, “Minority Rights”, “Rights and Politics”. Having so many insights and headings, we started eliminating one by one to choose our focus. After the elimination, we determined 4 headings: Norms of Society, Awareness of Human Rights, Education, and Preconception. Having those headings, we started to form “How might we?” questions to see these themes from a different angle as we tried to write questions that have clear answers. After breaking into groups and writing the questions, we talked as a group and we established challenges and complications in the headings. We had a final elimination to specify what our main focus was. Eventually, when we aimed to have only one focus, we ended up with two headings that completed each other like a puzzle: Awareness of Human Rights and Preconception. These two headings complete each other and work together in ideal so; we could not think of separating them. After identifying the centre of our design thinking process, we started to investigate studies and projects that had been done before. As our headings have an abstract form, our main concern is to find concrete evidence and data to carry on our procedure and in the end create the most sustainable project we can with the resources we have.
Design Thinking is the most important part of our core mission at KUGA, that is, creating sustainable solutions for global problems. This process started with the training we received in the first semester and continued throughout the second semester and will continue from where it left off after the summer vacation. This is the best part of Design Thinking: it puts you in a never-ending cycle of learning and production. We each had the opportunity to strengthen our ties with our teams in this process, where we were divided into three separate groups and produced ideas on different problems, and tried to find solutions. Even though the online term is not the best place to develop human relations, working together regularly every week for a common purpose has also deepened our communication with the team. Despite all the difficulties, we had a year in which we learned, developed, changed, and kept our team spirit alive. We wish for better times for both KUGA and our world when we can be together physically and work for good causes.
Thank you 2020–21 cohort, you will always be remembered well.
By: Berfin Ateşsönmez, Deniz Lale İmer, Hanım Taştan, Nisa Özer and Semanur Avcı
