Growing Ideas Together

Growing Ideas Together: A Design Justice Workshop is a hands-on, participatory workshop co-produced by Lemay and the UDesign Justice Initiative (UDJI), taking place at the Forest Lawn Community Association. Families are welcome. Youth ages 11 to 18 are active participants, not observers.

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Over 2.5 hours, youth, community members, students, and design professionals will work side by side to co-develop spatial ideas for the Forest Lawn Community Association grounds, with a focus on an upcoming community garden enhancement project. The session is structured around four live phases: a power reset that reframes who counts as an expert, a community mapping exercise grounded in lived experience, a youth-led visioning round, and a rapid prototyping phase where participants use guided prompting to translate their ideas into visual concepts.

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What makes this session distinctive is its method. Rather than presenting design justice as a theory, the workshop demonstrates its work in real time. Practitioners take on the role of facilitators and translators, while youth and community members share lived experience and lead in the generation of ideas. A well-crafted prompt, as participants will discover, requires the same core elements as a design brief: what the space should be, who it is for, how it should feel, and what it needs to do.