“Diversity, inclusion, cooperation and awareness-raising are the main pillars of this project that seeks to bring together design professionals and art therapists in a common goal: to facilitate a co-design experience with groups at risk of social exclusion that will allow them, thanks to their experience of design and art therapy, to generate objects, products or campaigns that share a common commercial outlet, helping to improve the quality of life of users”, Ana Hernández, founding member of IDECART, tells us.
“With these people, what we want to do is activate a creative process that will allow them to materialise, make visible and demonstrate the capacity of social design and co-creation in dynamics that can also benefit them in their personal growth and well-being”, Ana goes on to say.
To this end, last September – thanks to a scholarship from Valencia World Design Capital 2022 – a group of ten design professionals began specific training to learn how to work with groups at risk of social exclusion, under the guiding hands of María Montero-Ríos, Xavier Giner and María Colomer. In turn, eight art therapists were also selected to form joint teams and to begin giving workshops as of February 2021.
“The design professionals and art therapists were selected on account of their ties to and interest in social design, and they are currently sharing a space for reflection and rapprochement between these two disciplines of art therapy and design for co-creation”, Ana explains.