Working as a “creative” entails power. The power to conceive of solutions that have a real impact. However, such an influence also comes with responsibility: for what purposes will this talent be harnessed?

With this programme, we intend to have creative minds experience first-hand how they are harnessing their talents as a lever, as a crowbar with social value. The goal: encouraging a new generation of architects, designers, copy writers, film makers, and other makers-slash-re-thinkers to bring about changes.

The “Design for Impact” Professional Master Class is intended for the searchers. Those who ask questions. Those who harbour ambition and an entrepreneurial spirit in the broadest sense of the word. Those hungry for other disciplines, with an unstoppable faith in collaboration. Those who want to get to know themselves better and who understand that the best thinking is produced by doing.

We aim to hone your creative confidence. By encouraging you to think about the role of creative minds and how such minds could work on different and better approaches. By handing you projects that surpass the conceptual and by giving you responsibility from concept to execution. By having you collaborate, across barriers, with businesses, government authorities, and other creative talents. Because if we want to tackle the Major Issues, we need to be so bold as to come up with radically new solutions.

That is why you will be working directly with the professional field for five months in a row. You will be attending inspiring sessions, working on actual cases, and continuously reflecting on your own role in the co-creative network that you are expanding. You will be refining your soft skills. You will be taking a critical look at yourself. But you will also become acquainted with methodologies, from design thinking on artistic activism to social and society-centred design, which you will scrupulously examine with the particular aim of finding your own method. Never dogmatic, always pragmatic.

Our ultimate goal is, on the one hand, to help you as a creative mind to gain a better perspective of your own qualities, in order to give you a head start on the labour market. On the other hand, we will be turning you into the spark on the tinder: the catalyst kindling the creativity in others, the reason why multi-disciplinary teams generate synergy, the individual acknowledging the power of creativity. A force for good, so to speak.

This track has been substantiated through a co-creation process based on the Skill Tree method. In collaboration with the professional field, this has produced a substantively relevant curriculum. A skill tree resembles a mind map: ideas are represented in the form of a branched tree. This tool has helped to gain a clear picture of key substantive themes and goals.

The track comprises an intensive week in which the participants complete a classic five-day “Design Sprint” in an inter-disciplinary setting, enhanced with exercises to increase group dynamics, and with a focus on the development of inter-human soft skills.

The goal is to utilise soft skills training and exercises to foster group dynamics in order to boost creativity in co-creative Design Sprints.

Students

• Cross-disciplinary collaboration with partners in the professional field;
• Learning to engage in self-assessment;
• 360° evaluation;
• Acquiring soft skills;
• Insight into the working elements of efficient creative teams;
• Working with Skill Tree method for curriculum design;

Teaching staff

• Teachers learn to act as facilitators and coaches;
• Ability to use alternatives to classic evaluation methods;
• 360° evaluation;
• Working with Skill Tree method for curriculum design

Researchers

• Access to professional network;

The programme

• Use of innovative educational methodologies;
• Expanding the range of programmes on offer;
• Recruiting additional students / new target group;
• Expanding a closely-knit network;
• Great measure of commitment and ownership among professional field partners when rolling out the curriculum;
• Co-creation of the programme results in joint responsibility for the curriculum;

The professional field

• Developing partnerships;
• Collaborating with enthusiastic students and staff teams;
• Collaborating in a co-creation process to develop new study tracks;
• Being part of a closely-knit network;
• Assume co-ownership of the programme (going public of their own accord regarding their contribution);

Other

• Collaboration with stakeholders other than the professional field relevant to the programme, e.g., local authorities or companies.

• How do you set up and manage an efficient network, how do you maintain a kind of eco system of partners with a co-creative culture? This takes a great deal of time, whilst not producing any immediate returns. University colleges have difficulty accommodating such goals in the standard principles that govern the substantiation of teachers’ briefs. Many decisions are now being taken on an ad hoc basis. How do you fit this into the system already in place at an educational establishment? How do other organisations go about this? What policy is best pursued?
• What competencies are relevant among teachers when it comes to the professional expansion and maintenance of such networks?
• How can community management competencies be expanded among teachers? Recruitment policy?
• Calling in external consultants commanding the required competencies to “maintain” a network, or would enhancing the competencies among one’s own staff be preferable?
  
• How do you win over an institution as a whole to acknowledging the need for tackling and developing innovative issues in new ways? How do you get a larger institution - even though LUCA constitutes a comparatively small university college – sufficiently agile to play along with challenges in the field and requests from students to set up essentially different forms of education? How can the professional field contribute to such efforts via a co-creative process?

In both the first and the second semester, we are interrupting the regular lessons after six weeks in the purview of a Challenge Week. During this week, all attention will be focused on a real case commissioned by an external principal. The students study the target group and work in a result-oriented manner on the goals defined by the principal. Here, the process is more important than the product.

We are looking for assignments that are socially relevant and render students aware of the role played by the media in societal issues. In this respect it is important for the issues to be topical, concrete, authentic, and meaningful.

In addition to the assignment, the students are provided with supporting information and methods delivered on a just-in-time basis. The students also apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes acquired previously, in an integrated manner. All this must take place within a timeframe of 1 work week, which inevitably has the students working against the clock.

The selection of a relevant context and issue gives students an incentive and inspires them. This is enhanced by additional presentations and an efficient use of space and place.

The win-win outcome is that the principal is genuinely interested in the opinions of the 18-24-year-olds and harbours a genuine expectation of what can be delivered within such a limited timeframe. The week is rounded off with a jury session in which both the principal and the students select the top 3 entries, which are awarded a nice prize.

The ideas are collected and submitted to the principal. Not uncommonly, the principals will build on the ideas within their own companies.

Students

• Quickly delving into new issues and learning to work under pressure of time;
• Stepping out of their comfort zone;
• Collaboration between teachers and a team of students;
• Networking with businesses;

Teaching staff

• Being and remaining alert;
• Connection with Partners in Education;
• Networking;

Researchers

• Submitting relevant research to students and teachers, enabling them to take account of the latest insights;

The programme

• Firm connection with partners;
• Learning from one another;
• Focus on what is going on;

The professional field

• Being and remaining alert;
• Getting to know the programme and the dynamics of collective learning;
• We set great store by substantiating our programmes in co-creation with the professional field. That is why we have structural collaboration agreements in place with several media and entertainment companies such as DPG Media, Roularta, and Telenet as “Partner in Education”.

• Expanding good partner network;
• It takes power of persuasion to have companies work with first-year students;
• Emphasising to the principal that students operate as a shadow cabinet; importance of proper expectation management;
• Selection of a case that can be handled within a single week;
• Very strict timing;
• Teacher competencies: project management, coordinating project set-up / good briefing, providing students with proper inspiration;
• Coaching;
• Guiding rather than judging; the public and the principal decide.