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University guidelines and supporting documents
This pack includes everything you need to run a Fixperts project including guidelines, top tips for your students, some ‘How to’ guidance, an example Fixperts workshop, presentations and the Fixperts logos.
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University tutors can also download the Fixperts for Schools pack.
These sessions, used to introduce specific skills or knowledge such as user centred-design or idea generation, have proved popular with some university tutors too. You might find activities like Levels of listening, Brief hunting, Idea generation, Satsumas or Cannibalising useful in supporting your teaching.
Share your Fixperts project so we can share it on?
Complete the form below to tell us about your Fixperts project. This allows us to better understand activity and develop insight and evaluation. Within the form we will ask:
- University and course name
- Year and month of the project start
- Length of course in weeks
- Number of students
- Which Fixperts resources did you use?
- What were your teaching goals?
- Did you run any special events?
- What is the most memorable moment?
- Would you be happy for us to contact you to discuss an Insights post to share this information more widely on the Fixperts website?
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Fix Film form
Share the form below with your students for them to complete so that we can gather Fix Films and add to the Fixperts archive.
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Here’s a selection of our most common questions.
Download the Guidelines to Fixperts for the complete FAQs.
Fixperts is a learning programme which challenges students to create solutions for day- to-day problems of a real person. Rooted in a creative, human-centred design process, it integrates designing, engineering, critical thinking and practical making skills for social benefit.
We offer free guidelines and materials to universities and schools to allow them to run Fixperts projects independently. Forth offers support in the form of mentoring, training, facilitation, advice and extended /bespoke materials.
We do this because we think the world desperately needs creative problem solvers, who combine ingenuity with empathy and resilience. We started in universities but have moved to working also with schools because this is where we believe we can make the most difference to the innovators of tomorrow.
Fixperts, and its sister programme FixCamp, are conceived and run by the people at Forth – a community interest company who believe in the power of creativity as a tool for social change.
We are run by a small group of individuals with deep expertise in design education and public engagement.
We support open access and sharing, and send and share content and materials and ingenious fixes far and wide, but the Fixperts name is protected by trademark to ensure it reflects our values and quality standards. Please use our name and our materials respectfully.
Fixperts always involves fixing something for someone else. All Fixperts projects challenge participants:
- To solve problems creatively, which encourages agency, resourcefulness and resilience
- To fix for someone else (the Fix Partner), which encourages generosity, empathy and a
social orientation
- To work in teams, which encourages collaboration, negotiation and respect
- To gift the solution to the Fix Partner which develops generosity, inclusion and community
- To tell their story, which encourages insight, perspective and critical skills
- To do all this in real life, which encourages community engagement, requires prototyping and making skills and to bring it to completion, and to share their ideas openly, contributing to an innovation culture.
In all formats, even the shortest, students can experience the key values that Fixperts promotes, such as empathy, design for social good, prototyping, and teamwork. If you need advice on how to adapt Fixperts to your situation, please get in touch.
There are a few options depending on your interest and needs. The options are:
- Run it independently: Most universities run Fixperts independently. Just download the guidelines and go! Let us know how you get on by uploading films and sharing with us via the upload form or email, and we will be able to promote all of your amazing fixes and university on our website and social media.
- Contact us to tap into support and contacts: Some people can really benefit from the little kickstart that a conversation or mentoring offers. We’ll try our best to answer directly or put you in touch with others who have taught Fixperts and are happy to share their experiences and insights.
- We can work with you: We have worked with ambitious universities or those with specific needs to provide a range of paid services, helping adapt the brief to suit conditions, creating rich materials and providing introductory talks, taster sessions and workshops. We’ve even done a ‘Festival of Fixing’!
Remember to sign up for our newsletter via our website – this is how we can keep you in touch with new films, refreshed materials and case studies of how other universities have approached this.
Fixperts has been used by tutors to deliver a range of learning outcomes, spanning skills and knowledge. These have included sustainability, innovation, user centred design, universal design, social design and workshop skills and material intelligence.
Fixperts projects have been successfully run in design and engineering programmes at Foundation, BA and Masters levels. Fixperts could be run in any programme which deals with creative problem solving, and in which making skills are relevant. Or as an introduction to pro- social design. Content and activities may need to be adapted to suit the group you are working with.
Most universities have integrated Fixperts into their assessed coursework. In the UK this includes University of Brighton, Brunel, Kingston and Royal College of Art.; Internationally this is part of undergraduate design studies at NCAD in Dublin, HIT in Israel, Hosei University in Japan, Johannesburg University in South Africa, Tongji in China and UAMA in Mexico.
Some of them have found the Helen Hamlyn Fixperts Awards judging criteria useful in addition to their project based assessment:
- Impact on and relationship with the Fix Partner and surrounding beneficiaries.
- Inventiveness of solution and quality of prototyping, storytelling, sharing information of the designs.
Some courses also consider scalability and some use the Fixperts project as first stage of a bigger design project.
A Fixperts project does not have a fixed timeframe. It depends on the level of the problem being addressed, the availability of the Fix Partners and the course timetable. The most common timeframe has been to run it over a half or full term. With weekly tutoring sessions. It has also been a popular as an intensive workshop format, often with guest tutors, over anything from 3-days to 2-weeks. Some courses have used it as a kick starter for projects which have had a longer span.
