Design for All

Design for All is an undergraduate Industrial Design course at San Jose State University. The students work closely with local community members to solve challenges the neighborhood is facing (such as safety, litter, and a lack of greenery) through a collaborative co-design process. The class is part of CommUniverCity, which is a partnership between the University, the City of San Jose, and community members. This unique partnership creates open communication between the three groups, and it sets up a win-win-win scenario: downtown San Jose residents have access to opportunities and resources to build vibrant communities, city officials are able to connect directly with communities to better serve their needs, and students gain invaluable experience in community engagement.

The Design for All class project is innovative because it does so much with so little. We leverage existing community structures (neighborhood leadership groups, the university, and the city) to enact real change within the neighborhood. We are connecting urban planners, industrial designers and city departments to define and solve problems, but not using the standard top-down approach to community development. Local residents, who are the true experts on their own community, are involved in the design process from the very beginning. Together we co-create low-cost solutions to neighborhood problems that the residents themselves can build, maintain and improve upon.

I am an Urban Planning graduate student, specializing in urban design, which is a truly interdisciplinary field. While taking a class outside of my department (an Industrial Design ergonomics course), I learned of the Design for All course. Professor Leslie Speer created Design for All to teach her students about creating low-cost, easily-implementable designs, and how to use design thinking to tackle challenges that aren't usually viewed as "design problems." This course has previously worked with communities in a more rural area of California, but I was working with the local Spartan Keyes neighborhood for an Urban Planning class (report PDF here), and it was clear that this community could benefit from using a collaborative design process to tackle the challenges they were facing.

I was working as a graduate assistant for CommUniverCity, and approached the Executive Director about creating a partnership between the Industrial Design and Urban Planning departments and the Spartan Keyes community. It has been wonderful to see how rejuvenating this collaboration has been for the neighborhood. They have always been appreciative of help from the Urban Planning students, who have worked with them to define their own priorities for change within their community. However, these are long term goals and it isn't always immediately clear to the neighborhood how change is being fostered. 

Adding the industrial design students into the mix has provided a real "shot in the arm" for the community. Through hands-on design sessions, they've been able to identify which issues they'd like to tackle first, and then have created solutions to these issues that they can build and replicate themselves in the future.