Empower the Future: The Inside Story of Building Creative Space for Sub-urban Kampong’s Children

Imagine design as generator. Throughout our practice of empowerment we believed that design should be the champion of generating change within the community, thus we based our thinking and action under what we called DAG (Design as Generator). We then developed design-research-action methodology for DAG and to put design in the front line of empowerment practice. It combined PAR (Participatory Action Research) and DT (Design Thinking) under the MMR’s (Mixed Methods Research) Sequential Embedded Experimental model. These complex processes resulted on three strategic themes that DAG developed for empowering community called ‘Memory’, ‘Hope’ and ‘Sense’. The paper will focus on discussing ‘Hope’ as it aimed on constituting the future, in which DAG believes that the children will be the leading role shaping it within the community. The paper will tell the story on how it would be done through a community design project, initiated by DAG called ‘KaKiKuKeKo’ project (‘Creative and Collaborative Gathering for Our Kampong’) held at suburban kampong in Southern Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia. It aimed on activating the children creativity through their playing and improvement of their reading activities. It then would be translated and designed into space, in which in its process it would be an active collaboration and participation with the children itself. This paper is about their hope and story glancing creatively into the future.