Re-thinking Danish Schools

At the Rockwool Foundation, they focus on the wellbeing of young people. They do so because more and more young people get in touch with psychiatry and/or being diagnosed in psychiatry. So, mental health issues are on the rise, and our solutions are neither socially nor economically sustainable. The project therefore focuses on creating an intervention that generates better circumstances for wellbeing in the first place.

My master thesis focused on re-thinking Danish primary schools, where the goal is to make every student thrive instead of getting them the highest education. Through a series of co-creations with people from the school system, we have identified where the school system lacks and how we could design radically different solutions. One of the experiments we propose is a school where education is not one-size-fits-all but rather a custom-made program focused on following the child’s interests.

It was heart-warming to invite teachers, school leaders, and children into our co-creation sessions. By providing them with the right tools and questions, they could share their perspectives and mind-blowing ideas on how to do things differently. The sessions usually ended up something like the image above, which we put in an easy-to-understand visual format afterwards.

At the end of the thesis, we invited fellow designers at the foundation to discuss the co-design approach and brainstorm how to change the company culture to create more room for co-design activities.