An Alternative Youth Work Provision

Our Experiential Learning programme increases agency and employability through our learners real life practice of Human Centred Design.

What is Human Centred Design?

A creative approach to problem solving and the backbone of our work at Tribe All Democratic College.. It’s a process that starts with the young people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor-made to suit their needs.

Human-centered design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating tons of ideas.

The experience is gained when building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually putting your innovative new solution out in the world.

Design is an important aspect of  social innovation. Challenges that arise when there are limited resources, services, or infrastructure require new approaches.

Services need to be created from end-to-end to have the desired impact. It’s essential to gain a deep understanding of the people you will be serving—not only what they need but what limitations they face, what motivates them, and what’s important to them

Practicing The Mindset Of A Social Designer

Designing systems is about balancing the complexity of many different stakeholder needs. For example, if you were designing a new type of college, the needs of the students, staff and community are key. Systems design often involves setting high-level strategy such as stating visions, priorities, policies, and key communications around these ideas.

Human-centered design is as much about your heart as it is your head. This Mindset uncovers the philosophy behind our approach to creative problem solving, and shows that how you think about design directly affects whether you’ll arrive at innovative, impactful solutions. Here are our seven skills learned to inherit this Mindset.

Designer Soft Skills:

  • Learn from Failure
    “ Don’t think of it as failure, think of it as designing experiments through which you’re going to learn.”
  • Creative Confidence
    “ Creative confidence is the notion that you have big ideas, and that you have the ability to act on them.”
  • Make It
    “ You’re taking risk out of the process by making something simple first. And you always learn lessons from it.”
  • Empathy
    “ I can’t come up with any new ideas if all I do is exist in my own life.”
  • Embrace Ambiguity
    “ We may not know what that answer is, but we know that we have to give ourselves permission to explore.”
  • Be Open Minded
    “An open mind is the embrace of possibility, the idea that even if we don’t know the answer, it’s out there and that we can find it.”
  • Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
    “ What an iterative approach affords us is that we gain validation along the way...because we’re hearing from the people we’re actually designing for.”

Accreditation

Tribe All Democratic College strives to empower its learners and faculty globally through its applied soft skills development platform and experiential certifications. We formally upskill faculty as mentors and provide learners with project development frameworks and experiences to make them life and work ready.

Our college is in the process of applying to accredit our programs through the National Open College Network (NOCN) including awards and certifications in Equality diversity & inclusion, Health & wellbeing, volunteering, Information advice & guidance, Mediation, Leadership & governance for trustees, Peer mentoring and Teaching, training & assessment, and an online portfolio highlighting achievements.

Spaces, Systems & Process

Our democratic environments give young people strong signals that influence how they feel about themselves and others. We can create new experiences and interactions in these spaces. Human-centered design can help make the emotional parts of a space as important as the functional!
Community DevelopmentCivic Participation
Taking part in the design of systems is about balancing the complexity of many different stakeholder needs with the needs of our social enterprises. Systems design often involves setting high-level strategy such as stating visions, priorities, policies, and key communications around these ideas..
Social EntrepreneurshipExperiential Learning
You’ll find yourself shifting gears through the process, moving from observations to highly critical thinking, and then right back again into the nuts and bolts of your working prototype’s. With each new cycle you’ll come closer and closer to the solution that is best suited for you and the people you’re designing for..
Continued Professional DevelopmentSelf Agency