“Ageing in Bergen: Designing with communities for social innovation”.

Dr Yanki Lee (director of the HKDI DESIS Lab for Social Design Research).

Professor Eli-Kirstin Eide (Interior Architect, Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHiB), Department of Design).

Professor Camilla Ryhl (Architect, Bergen School of Architecture, BAS).

Professor Carolyn Ahmer (Architect, Bergen University College (HiB), Department of Civil Engineering, Physical planning and technical infrastructure).

The four of us met at the Universal Design Conference 2012 in Copenhagen, and we shared a concern about the future trends of Universal Design (UD). There were three main themes evoked from the conference: from regulation to innovation, from accessibility to the inclusion and from barriers to sustainability. However, as educators, we all feel that it is difficult to coach our students to understand the development of UD and practice it due to its unclear definition. Therefore, we developed an experiential learning experiment, which we created to get our students to explore the UD methodology in the real world. Our goal was to encourage them to challenge the concept but more important is for them to develop their own UD practice. Our experiment was entitled “Ageing in Bergen: Designing with communities for social innovation”. In order to develop new practices for the UD concept, we broadened the scope of the experiment by adding two elements: interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement.

Two weeks in Feb 2014 in Bergen, over 70 students from three schools (KHiB, BAS, HiB) were divided into 6 teams to work with communities around different stations of the light rail between the city centre and Lagunen Storsenterof Bergen city, i.e. each team picked a station. It started with my introduction of design practice, which covered an explanation of many human-centred design practices. The intention was to keep it open ended and let students interpret the experiment in their way. With the different mind-sets and expectations, members of interdisciplinary teams were coached to conduct design events as prototypes of ideas for the future. Throughout the process, a fixed definition of UD was unfolded in different ways. Transferring a dark and unsafe subway into a new community party space was a case to make UD from regulation to innovation. Accessibility brought students and care home residents together and the team created a walking path using a big roll of white paper and test ideas of programmes for inclusion. Identified barriers around the lake and inserted new programmes to form a bird-lovers club to bring different generations together to preserve the city’s green landscape for the birds; promoting sustainability. The interdisciplinary combination created a unique situation to develop new insights for new design practice for universal issues.

In September 2014 the project was presented in the Cumulus Conference in Johannesburg: “Design with the other 90 %: Changing the world by design.”