What happens when we stop designing activities for seniors and start designing meaningful roles with them? Open Village shows how user research helped reframe an underused nursing home garden into an ecosystem of contribution, purpose and community participation.

How can an ordinary school corridor support students with different sensory needs? We look at how sensory trails can provide proprioceptive, vestibular and movement experiences while giving schools a low-maintenance, space-efficient way to support inclusive participation.

What happens when children face long waits or hospital stays with limited access to play? By listening to patients and parents, we reframed the challenge and created a 24/7 vending solution for safe, individual toys and parent-child activity kits.

How can Design Thinking make an anti-shop theft poster more impactful?In this SPF and NCPC project for college and university students, we started with real experiences and emotions before moving into core messages, visual metaphors and our See, Think, Feel, Do framework. The result was a design process rooted in human insight, not just aesthetics.

Two classes. 60 students. One shared goal: to design for children with empathy and purpose. Guided by Little Changemakers’ programme design framework, students learnt to rethink everyday sensory activities so children with different support needs can participate with greater clarity, dignity, and joy.

In many nursing homes, seniors are well cared for, but daily life can still become passive. Open Village was created to change that. It is a community-based model that helps seniors take on meaningful mini jobs with progression, while opening the nursing home to schools, volunteers, families, and partners through purposeful community engagement.

A behind-the-scenes look at how museum education shaped our empathy-led, research-rooted approach to designing community programmes.