PINE in a nutshell

Context

PINE [Programa de introducción a las nuevas economías] is a post-graduate programe organice with the National University of Córdoba. It's an introductory program that allowed 120 students from 10 different countries in Latin America to explore 12 new economic theories that aim for a more sustainable, inclusive and regenerative way of living.

User Personas

I joined this team as a Learning Experience Designer, challenging myself to explore new fields where I could apply my UX knowledge and experience. I proposed to start defining the Personas we wanted to take care of during the program. We got three different groups:

• Students: 120 People coming from different countries and backgrounds.

• Teachers: 12 Leads for the New Economies

• The organising team: 3 People from the university staff and three from PINE.

Design Goals

The next step was defining our goals for each group; Victor suggested and guided a mini-meditation where we visualised how the end of the program looked for each other. After this, we shared our ideas on a MIRO board, prioritised them and translated them into measurable goals we could follow during the program.

Design intentions (aka goals) for students:

• Open new and diverse perspectives to the New Economies that are emerging

• Create closeness between students, teachers and organisers (even in virtuality)

Learning tools

As part of the enrollment process, we did a student survey and learned more about them. With the information from the survey, I created an Agenda containing all the students' profiles. This shared database significantly impacted the "closeness goal" as it allowed them to get to know their colleagues fast when they went to a breakup room during the classes.

We thought deeply about our communication channels and decided to create a Whatsapp channel where we sent information before and after the classes, sharing an introduction video of the upcoming teachers or solving student doubts during the program. We also set up a virtual classroom where they could find information about the teachers, presentations, books and videos they share during the classes.

Final assignment: How do we learn?

As this was a university class, we needed to create a final assignment that showed the student's progress during this program. I ran a brainstorming workshop where we got to a powerful question: Do we all learn the same way? How do we embrace different learning processes?

We designed an assignment that reflected the diversity of the program and allowed each student to choose their own version of the final project by answering these questions:

• How do I learn (researching, doing, sharing, etc.)?

• Which of the economies caught my attention?

• How do I want to present what I learn to others?

Cosecha (aka Harvest)

Creating a space for this individuality took PINE to many diverse environments: secondary school classrooms, local government meetings, traditional companies and certified B corps. However, we believed that the greater goal was to create something as a group, so we decided to collect all the individual assignments in a magazine called Cosecha (Harvest).

I coordinated a group of mentors that helped the students with the assignments, learned how to use Indesign and did the editorial design of the Cosecha. I'm super happy with the result because I experience the expansive power of a co-creation process. And I got to see how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Check out the result!

In total, 77 people co-created this magazine, which is full of love and information about New Economic Theories in Latin America.

You can see it here at this link: https://indd.adobe.com/view/eaff511d-2e20-41ce-812f-574581fad57f