The Change Agents Project aimed to promote inclusion, diversity, and collaboration between higher education institutions, NGOs, and local communities through social design practices. Key objectives included fostering partnerships to address real community needs, building a more inclusive higher education system by integrating non-academic actors, and advancing social design as a tool for societal impact. The project also sought to tackle environmental and climate challenges, emphasizing their effects on marginalized communities, and to develop innovative teaching and learning methods. These goals were achieved through a comprehensive literature review, interviews with practitioners, successful pilot activities, and the creation of the final Blueprint. The Blueprint serves as a practical resource for changemakers, providing tools and frameworks to implement inclusive, sustainable, and impactful educational settings, bridging the gap between academia and societal needs.
The motivation for the project rooted in the foundation of an internationally unique Social Design Network (SDN) involving partners from prestigious universities sharing knowledge, training socially sensitive designers and creative professionals by sharing research, projects and courses, which activities are essential in the integration of social design into strategies tackling social and ecological problems. The field of social design is evolving, but there has been a significant lack of knowledge-sharing tools regarding the best practices and know-how of collaborations between local NGOs and HEIs. The lack of effective tools that combine research, intervention and dissemination also increases distances among the disciplines, which results in methodological gaps and fragmented problem-solving approaches that prevent connecting and applying the expertise coming from community-based experiences and design interventions. Mapping the existing good practices of horizontal collaboration and creating recommendations for implementing such meaningful cross-sectoral endeavours can fill these gaps while also providing an alternative designer attitude and career path in the HEI ecosystem, and an impactful usage of design in the NGO sector.