Case Study: Co-Designing Safe Spaces with Underrepresented Youth in STEM

Thus far, at least five communities have used the Talisman approach in their co-design workshops and practice. These include STEM education-focused nonprofits, university faculty projects, and well as youth design groups based in the United States and India. Here, we give a preview of findings from just one workshop where Talisman was used by a community.

In this co-design workshop, we partnered up with a nonprofit in Chicago and 9 Black teens and young adults to co-design safe spaces, specifically a kickback event for the broader Chicago community. The nonprofit leadership team had been previously leading co-design workshops, and wanted a way to encourage the teens and young adults to bring in aspects of their identities and lived experiences into the workshops. Hence, we worked with the nonprofit leadership to incorporate Talisman into their practice. Overall, we found that Talisman and the personal objects participants brought in helped inform participants’ event design, add structure to the workshop and conversation, and connect participants to one another and foster common ground in ways that were deeper than previously experienced.

On the whiteboard, you can see the range of personal objects the participants brought in (Choose), the connections participants drew among their objects (Connect), as well as key considerations participants came up with when creating a safe space (Consider).

If you are interested, you can find a short summary of the workshop in the following video and more details in the longer paper in Further Reading.