A hands-on program to help you lead change and grow your circle

Program outline

Week 1:  Experience & Worldview

  • Worldviews & intercultural belonging (20 mins)

  • Introduction to experience design: definitions, scope, and importance

  • User-centered design principles

  • How European culture and landscape can inform experience design

Week 2: Safe spaces 

  • Basics of empathy in design and how to understand needs

  • Belonging vs. othering

  • Response & repair

Week 3: Understanding your belonging experiment

  • Converting observations into insights

  • Identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement in local contexts

  • Introduction to problem statements (& write problem statements)

Week 4: Language & ideation

  • Track your blindspots

  • Narrative shift including deep shift

  • Common traps we fall into when we create ideas (human-centred, white savourism, professionalism)

  • Imperfect doing

  • Working on your belonging experiment concept

Week 5: Designing your belonging experience (Concept Generation & Prototyping)

  • Reverse brainstorming

  • Brainstorming and ideation techniques: Reverse brainstorming, mind mapping, rapid sketching.

  • Communicating your concept with your target groups: Inclusive Language & counter speech

  • Approaching inclusivity and accessibility in experience design

  • Prototyping

Week 6: Decolonising Iteration & Testing

  • Small group co-working and getting feedback

  • Learning from testing

  • Not just doing for the sake of it

  • Repair & harm reduction in iteration

  • Implicit bias (iterating as a way to confirm our own bias)


Week 7: Project work the Final prototype & experience insights

  • Participants showcase their work via video diaries of their belonging experiment

Week 8: My role 

  • Reflecting on the experience of running the prototype

  • Moving forward

    My role

    Empathy reflection circles

    Moving forward with (un)learning

**Belonging Experiments: small things that you can do to come closer to the missing space in your new home city

Program outcomes

Program logistics

Through this 8-week course you’ll gain tools, inspiration, and community to design small experiments that invite connection, belonging, and change. By the end of the course, you will:

  • Understand what shapes your sense of belonging, from culture and migration to systems and power, and how these forces impact your daily life in a new place.

  • Learn how to design with empathy. Practice listening, observing, and asking better questions so you can understand the real needs of the people around you and challenge assumptions (including your own).

  • Create your own “belonging experiment.” Turn your insights into a small, real-world action: a space, moment, or experience that brings more connection, care, or courage into your city.

  • Build confidence in your own voice. Leave with new tools, fresh language, and a deeper sense of how you can shape your environment, even without waiting for permission.

The programme will consist of weekly live sessions of two hours each, held every Wednesday after working hours (from 16:30 onwards), beginning at the beginning of November. The exact schedule will be confirmed once the final cohort is formed. In addition to the live sessions, participants will engage in asynchronous learning through smaller peer groups, or “crews,” designed to deepen reflection and collaboration. This component is expected to require no more than two additional hours per week.

The programme’s content is progressive, with each session building on the previous one. The final two weeks may be slightly more intensive, as participants consolidate their learning and prepare collective outputs. Commitment levels can be adapted to individual availability and preferences. Progress will be assessed through engagement rather than attendance, recognising active participation across synchronous sessions, online whiteboards, and self-directed assignments.