Designing for Kinderfaculteit Pendrecht

Abstract

Kinderfaculteit Pendrecht, one of the programs of Stichting de Verre Bergen, offers children in Pendrecht the opportunity to spend their time in a useful way through after-school lessons. The Kinderfaculteit’s vision is to stimulate curiosity and perseverance among the children. As this vision is not yet integrated into their working method, the research team of Stichting de Verre Bergen is researching techniques to stimulate curiosity and perseverance. The aim of this graduation project is to integrate the core concepts of curiosity and perseverance within the Kinderfaculteit, using a design approach.

The project utilizes the Double Diamond structure (Framework for Innovation: Design Council’s Evolved Double Diamond, 2022). Since this graduation project is a social design project, various methods involving stakeholders are utilized, including semi-structured interviews, observations, and co-creation sessions.

In order to integrate curiosity and perseverance into the working method of the Kinderfaculteit, a roadmap is designed as a means to achieve this goal. Additionally, three concepts are designed to make each phase of the roadmap more tangible, while also serving as inspiration and potential starting points for the Kinderfaculteit. The roadmap and concepts are further explained in a booklet, which is delivered to the Kinderfaculteit as a final outcome. The resulting design is validated with one of the project managers of the Kinderfaculteit, yielding encouraging results since she is planning to incorporate the final design during the implementation of the core concepts. To enhance the feasibility of the design, suggestions are made to complement the roadmap and concepts.

This project demonstrates that taking a design approach to stimulate specific behaviours within an organization, like the Kinderfaculteit, provides insights into the various touchpoints that can influence the stimulation of curiosity and perseverance. Learning specific behaviours involve numerous different variables beyond an individual (such as these touchpoints), which can be difficult to determine using conventional, analytical research methods. Given the predominant focus on individual-level research on learning these behaviours, the importance of investigating the stimulation of behaviours like curiosity and perseverance on an organizational and/or group level is emphasized, rather than solely at the individual level.