When Students Are Asked to Redesign their Hometown

Over the past two decades, technological development has increasingly been framed through three priorities: speed, efficiency and scale. Platforms have become faster, devices more responsive and digital services more personalised. Yet many of these systems have also been built around a less visible objective: capturing attention and keeping users engaged for as long as possible.

This tension is no longer confined to debates among technology critics. The European Commission’s 2024 Fitness Check of EU Consumer Law on Digital Fairness examined how practices such as manipulative interfaces, personalised targeting and addictive design can affect consumer autonomy in digital environments. The question is therefore not simply whether technology works, but whose interests its design ultimately serves.

A similar imbalance can be observed in the physical spaces around us. For decades, many cities have prioritised the speed and movement of private vehicles over accessibility, social interaction and the everyday experience of pedestrians. Research by the OECD’s International Transport Forum highlights the significant pressure that car traffic places on limited urban space and argues for a shift away from policies centred exclusively on mobility and speed towards a broader focus on accessibility and urban liveability (Crozet, 2020).

We live in an era of extraordinary technological advancement, yet social isolation remains one of the defining challenges of contemporary life. In 2025, the World Health Organization reported that one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness. Among people aged 13 to 29, reported rates ranged between 17% and 21%, with the highest levels found among teenagers.

Our cities may be becoming “smarter”, our devices more responsive and our algorithms more sophisticated. But technological sophistication does not automatically create stronger communities, more inclusive public spaces or a deeper sense of belonging.

This contradiction is also reflected in education. Students are frequently taught how digital systems function, how code is written and how machines process information. Far less attention is sometimes given to the assumptions built into those systems, their social consequences or the people whose lives they are intended to improve.

The UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Students challenges this narrow understanding of technological education. Rather than treating students simply as users of digital tools, it presents them as responsible citizens and potential co-creators of technology. Its proposed competencies include a human-centred mindset, AI ethics, critical judgement and the inclusive and sustainable design of technological systems.

In other words, it is not enough to teach young people how the machine works. We must also encourage them to ask who the machine is for.

A recent educational activity at the 1st Junior High School of Naousa, in northern Greece, explored this question through the students’ immediate environment. Led by EduQuest within the wider EITIC-EU project, the initiative invited them to examine their surroundings and consider how design, technology and creativity could address the needs of the local community.

During the activity in Naousa, however, students were not initially confronted with statistics about gender inequality or asked to discuss technology in the abstract. They began with a simple question:

“What does a city need in order to become an ideal place to live?”

Seeing the City Through the Eyes of Its Students

The students approached the idea of the “ideal city” through the realities of everyday life. Their proposals focused on the conditions that make a public space genuinely usable and welcoming: safe movement, accessible routes, places to sit, protection from the summer heat and opportunities for people to meet and participate in community life. 

Working in groups, first-year students at the Lappeio 1st Junior High School of Naousa were asked to examine the city’s central square and respond to a more concrete version of the original question: “If you had the opportunity to redesign the central square of Naousa, what would you change?” Their proposals, documented by EduQuest as part of the EITIC-EU activity, focused on the everyday realities of the people who use the square.

The students called for additional access ramps and safer pedestrian crossings. They proposed shelters, more comfortable seating, public drinking fountains and improved lighting. They emphasised the need to preserve the square’s large trees, recognising that greenery is not simply decorative but essential to comfort and quality of life; particularly during the increasingly hot summer months.

Their plans also included infrastructure for electric bicycles and a music stage for cultural events. Taken together, these ideas presented the square not as an empty space between buildings, but as part of the city’s social infrastructure: a place where people should be able to move, rest, meet and participate.

The students’ proposals reflected a broader understanding of innovation. Accessibility, comfort and safety may appear less technologically impressive than sensors or interactive systems, yet they often have a more immediate impact on daily life. For a wheelchair user, an older resident, a parent pushing a pram or a teenager looking for a safe place to meet, features such as ramps, shaded seating and accessible routes can determine whether the public square feels genuinely open to them. 

The activity asked students to examine urban design from the perspective of the people who use public spaces every day. They considered which needs are often overlooked and how accessibility, comfort and inclusion could be integrated into the square from the outset. In that sense, their proposals reflected a basic principle of human-centred design: a solution cannot be considered successful solely because it functions technically. It must also respond to the realities of the people expected to use it.

But students do not automatically learn to see themselves as designers, engineers or people with the authority to reshape their surroundings. To help them make that intellectual leap, the activity introduced them to women who had already challenged the boundaries of their professions and, in doing so, changed how cities, machines and public infrastructure could be imagined.

Learning from Women in STEAM

To help students see that they could influence the spaces and technologies around them, the activity introduced them to four women whose work challenged established ideas about design, engineering and innovation. Some of them were:

• Kate Orff, a landscape architect and founder of SCAPE, demonstrated how cities can work with natural systems rather than attempting to control or replace them. Her approach connects directly with the students’ proposals for trees, shade and greener public spaces: environmental resilience does not always require more concrete or more machinery. Sometimes, it begins by allowing nature back into the city.
• Emily Warren Roebling offered a different lesson. When her husband, Washington Roebling, became seriously ill during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, she became an essential link between him, the engineers and the construction site. Her contribution challenged the boundaries imposed on women in nineteenth-century engineering and became inseparable for the bridge’s completion.
• Through Dr Fei-Fei Li, students encountered a more contemporary field. Her work on ImageNet helped transform computer vision and the way machines learn to recognise visual information. At the same time, her later advocacy for human-centred artificial intelligence raises a question central to the activity itself: technological capability cannot be separated from human responsibility.
• Finally, Jane Jacobs invited students to examine cities from street level. She rejected the idea that urban life could be understood only through large plans designed from above. Her concept of “eyes on the street” emphasised the role of active pavements, local knowledge and everyday human presence in creating safer and more vibrant neighbourhoods.

These women came from different periods and disciplines, but their work shared an important principle: innovation begins by questioning who has traditionally been allowed to design the world and whose needs that world has been designed to serve.

Crucially, these women were not presented only to the girls in the classroom. Their stories formed part of a shared educational experience for all students. Gender stereotypes in science and technology are not created or sustained by girls alone; they emerge from the wider culture in which children learn who is expected to become an engineer, a programmer or an inventor. Research has shown that stereotypically masculine representations of fields such as computer science can weaken women’s sense of belonging and discourage their participation (Cheryan et al., 2013).

Female role models can help challenge these assumptions. Studies suggest that contact with women working in STEM can strengthen female students’ identification with these fields, while female mentors can increase belonging, confidence and persistence among women studying engineering (Stout et al., 2011; Dennehy and Dasgupta, 2017). To be more precise, when boys and girls encounter women as engineers, scientists, architects and influential thinkers, female achievement becomes less likely to appear unusual or exceptional. It becomes part of the ordinary history of innovation.

Addressing the gender gap in STEAM depends on the culture students encounter throughout their education. Classrooms, curricula and the role models presented to young people all shape their understanding of who belongs in these fields and whose achievements are recognised.