We had our first lesson, “Find Your Way” as part of our Innovating Communities challenge, Designing Ballybay’s Future

This course is a 20 week marathon, for us to join together to develop and design a new future for Ballybay. Like many other towns in rural Ireland, Ballybay has some derelict, unused buildings in the town centre, and a community of residents who’d like to see these spaces transformed into multi-functional spaces to suit different activities.

We are embarking on a journey to make changes happen by using the Design Thinking Process. We started to explore how we can create a new mindset and use these skills to work alongside our challenge. If you missed our first lesson, you can join in and catch-up, as the video will be available to watch back. Over the course of our challenge, we’ll go through the stages of Accept, Empathise, Define, Test and Materialise to focus our project.

 

We started some discussions about the lack of a Community Centre in the town, and the need for spaces for young people, and the eldery in Ballybay- we spoke about creating Arts Studios, performance spaces and educational facilities for local residents. Our group currently is made up of six different members with a common interest in making Ballybay a better place to live, and we hope others will join us and make their voices heard.

 

As a human centred approach, this challenge is an active one where we discuss what we’d like to happen in Ballybay, and work towards making it a reality. People really are the key to driving change in the community, so I’ll leave you with our key principle this week:

 

If you would like to take part in our challenge you can sign up here