They have designs on saving water
CLOSE to 200 pupils from Wesfleur Primary School in Atlantis participated in a design thinking workshop in the city centre recently. The 180 Grade 6s were hosted by the City, GreenCape and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design Thinking (d-school) at UCT. The workshop introduced the concept of design thinking, focusing on “saving water at home and school”. It formed part of the Open Design Festival held at the City Hall, which ends tomorrow.
The workshop highlighted that the pupils were very aware they needed to save water, and led to a number of proposed interventions which were developed by the pupils themselves.
The event forms part of a broader Green Water Design and Innovation Programme initiated by the City, where human-centred design will be used as a way to generate creative solutions. The children were aware of the concept of the “green economy” and were excited about the prospect of new developments in the Atlantis Green Technology Special Economic Zone, given a green light by the Department of Trade and Industry’s advisory board a few weeks ago.
According to Dr Rael Futerman from the d-school: “It’s the first workshop that we are running with kids and it’s really great, really dynamic”.
In addition, this was also the largest workshop that the d-school has held, with the previous best comprising a group of 105 engineering students.
Futerman said the “cleantech” space is a particularly rich area for design thinking, as it is full of complex problems – something to keep in mind as Cape Town and the Western Cape look to different methodologies in solving the drought crisis.