In winter semester 2018, a student of my seminar Design Thinking and Human Values came up with the idea to work on the topic of intersex people. These are people who are born with male and female genitals. A lot of them suffer from an operation they have in their very early childhood in order to correct their gender. The faith of those children got under the skin of my students. This motivated them intrinsically to organize and host the first Intersex Awareness Event at HTW Berlin, University of Applied Sciences on 29th of November 2018 to prevent future harm. They developed and executed the event in only 32 hours.
As a lecturer, I love working with my students on a challenge which they bring in by themself and which motivates them to work very hard on a vision that should become true in the foreseeable future. In this way, the students formed a smart team of responsible innovators who try to change things for the better in society.
For this reason they spread out their vision on a poster:
It is an approach from my side as a lecturer and coach for Design Thinking and Human Values: Talk about what causes harm for people or planet and design the vision for a new and better future. According to this approach, the students defined a goal for the event:
„Our goal is to call attention to the subject of intersexuality and to inform about it. We hope for a bigger understanding of the topic of intersexuality and respectful interaction with each other.“
Kevin Klaus
In this way, interaction became the keyword for their Intersex Awareness Event. During the event, the guests could walk around, interact with different exhibits in the dark and black painted room which were only lightened by spotlights. This created nearly a club atmosphere.
The students decided that the guests of the event had to be touched by their body, their soul , and their mind to understand intersexuality from all perspectives. Only in this holistic way, a deep understanding and reflection of intersexuality and gender is possible.
For this reason, the guests could find body, mind, and soul spaces in the room. At the bar, they could enjoy hot Glühwein and fresh popcorn; in the shop, they were invited to take the clothes with quotes from intersex people in their hands. The fitting box gave them the opportunity to try gender clothes and in the binary boxes which were full of classical toys for boys or girls, they could walk in to find out if this still fit. In the chill out area, they could take a seat on the beanbags to take a break or watch the WDR Doku „Das dritte Geschlecht“ and other videos about intersex.
Posters informed the guests about different aspects of intersex and gender:
See posters designed by Kevin Klaus
Throughout the seminar, I guided the students through the six steps of the Design Thinking Process. Here you will find a short summary of the most important insights of the process.
The design challenge the students wanted to take on was: How might we design an event about intersex?
In order to find specific fields of actions and to solve the design challenge, the students generated a set of questions to be answered:
With those questions in mind, they created exhibition items that pursued the goal of touching the visitors by their mind, their body, and/or their soul.
The students used clothes as a medium to transport messages from intersex people and their families because clothes - our second skin - are very close to us and our identity. They fixed quotes from those people on the clothes.
The event became a great success. A lot of visitors came in and stayed more than an hour by interacting with the objects, watching the videos, and talking in groups or gave feedback to the students.
In my opinion, as a lecturer, it was amazing to realize what is possible when students are motivated intrinsically and when they have the opportunity to develop a feeling of self-efficiency. They get in a flow. This is the best what can happen in a Design Thinking Process. People get rid of their fear to fail. I thank my students for having been part of this story.
From my point of view, it is important to give people a platform to talk about intersex and gender. It is high time to get more people interested in this topic because it is not only a short time trend. Roles are changing - strategies, products and services will follow and they will be different in the future.
