Dancing Around The World is a weekly community involvement event where people can come together and learn about different cultures through their traditional dances. This was created as a final project in my DES 166 Human Centered Design course. The goal of this project was to transform a popular gathering place called G-Street in downtown Davis. Taking inspiration from a previous design group, my team of four and I made celebrating diversity and cultures our theme. We conducted interviews with ten people to gain insight into their experience of cultural representation in Davis. After realizing how little of the Davis community’s broad range of diverse cultural backgrounds were truly represented, we came up with the idea of setting up weekly community involvement through dance. We tested our prototype in downtown Davis by teaching participants dances from globally diverse cultures. Using a human-centered design approach, our team encouraged people of the Davis community to engage with different cultures and to share their own. We learned that many people crave a sense of belonging but need a comfortable & accessible way to do so. Our team presented our design idea and prototyping process with the Davis City Council.
