During the fall of 2019, the New York City Department of Education launched Imagine NYC Schools as a part of a new vision for the largest school district in America – empower students and communities to play an active role in school formation and transformation. The initiative immediately sparked interest and hundreds of schools across all 5 NYC boroughs applied to become partners. Over the next few months, 90 teams participated in a series of Design Days which generated more excitement and engagement.

Unfortunately, this momentum came to an abrupt stop when COVID-19 struck in March 2020. A year later, the Imagine NYC Schools team began to reframe its work with more focus on their system’s critical needs: developing pedagogically rich student learning models along with intentional focus on equity practices. As a part of their reframing Imagine NYC Schools also reached out for partnership. 

Understanding design thinking as fundamentally an exploratory process, Imagine NYC Schools and Design for Emergence began our work together with a 5 day design sprint. This garnered the initiative a set of design principles and 18 prototypes to consider as a part of imagining possibilities for the Design Lab.

The process included a variety of stakeholders and provoked some insights about how we might reimagine more inclusive school change processes while tapping into the creativity and energy of NYC school communities.

According to liberatory design co-creator David Clifford (2010), we can “use the design thinking framework to begin the process of rethinking how we think, talk, write, and take action against inequities in education.” Within the design principles that surfaced during our design sprint, this nuance of design thinking was highlighted in our understanding of how change actually happens in schools. It also led us to focus on the human interaction that underlies collective experiences in schools while building one of the key programmatic tools for the Design Lab. 

Through dialogue, we continue to explore the strategic phases of development needed to build a Design Lab that can empower students and communities as participants in school change efforts. Each conversation leads to new thinking about how we might create structures to increase capacities across the system. Our hope is that this emergent approach will help us better understand the human needs and lived experiences that informs the transformative work of Imagine NYC Schools.