The Design Sprint Summer School is designed for high school students interested in modern digital technologies, design and their use. During the summer school, FIT experts introduced students to the Design Sprint method. Using a combination of lectures, workshops and teamwork, they showed them how to identify a problem, how to define it correctly, how to come up with creative designs and how to finally select, prototype, test and present the resulting solution.
The students worked in teams and each team came up with their own ideas on how to improve life in the city and promote its sustainable development. Together with mentors from the FIT CTU experts, they then used the Design Sprint method to find out whether their idea had a chance of success and to refine the idea into a form in which it is solvable. The high school students acquired new expertise in information technology, but they also learned how to make it fit into the context of the city and its sustainable development, everyday life and interpersonal communication.
One of the teams was dedicated to the involvement of citizens in the process of city creation with the aim of creating a universal unified solution applicable across the Czech Republic with the possibility of sending citizen proposals continuously, not only in a limited period of time. The team managed to develop and test a prototype. The testing showed that the solution makes sense and offers cities an idea how to involve citizens in city development planning. Another team chose the American Square in Prague, where they looked at reducing the number of parked cars and then making the overall space of the square more pleasant. Another team saw a safety issue in the public space, specifically in less frequent times at public transport stops. The solution would be to install cameras and panic buttons with an app linked directly to the emergency line. Another team was looking for a solution to optimally integrate micromobility into suburban and urban transport in the capital city of Prague for fast, pleasant and flexible transport. Finding a way to motivate citizens to recycle and to spread awareness about what and how to recycle was the aim of another project with the aptly named Recycle with me. The team designed a web application with complete information about recycling and a graphic design for the awareness campaign.
"I am glad that after last year's successful edition we could welcome young people from secondary schools who wanted to try something new, are interested in modern technologies and city life and are not afraid of the unknown," mentions the main mentor of the Design Sprint Summer School and head of the Image Processing Laboratory at FIT CTU, MSc. Ondřej Brém. "We finally chose City & Sustainable Development as the theme because the summer school takes place in the city and most of the students and mentors have personal experience with city life and can easily identify with the theme. In addition to imparting knowledge of information technology, we also showed the students a different perspective on the city and technology, and demonstrated methods and techniques for solving problems in team projects," adds Ondřej Brém.
Regular event Letní škola Design Sprint 2022 https://fit.cvut.cz/designsprint
