Designing with students and communities: what I learned from SEED-AI

By Sara Hamandi, 3rd Year Design Engineering student at Queen Mary University of London

What changes when students and community partners are involved in shaping up education, rather than simply being asked for feedback at the end?

As a student research assistant on the RAISE-funded SEED-AI project, I have been working alongside academic staff from Queen Mary University of London and University College London, as well as our community partner, E17 Films, to develop a proposed social entrepreneurship learning experience.

Figure 1: Co-designed SEED-AI framework for community-based learning, social entrepreneurship and responsible Generative AI

The project explores how students could work with community organisations on real social challenges using design thinking and responsible Generative AI. For me, however, one of the most important parts of the project has been experiencing partnership from two sides: being treated as a student partner by academic staff, while also learning how community partners can meaningfully shape a project.

Working as a student partner

My role was not simply to complete tasks that had already been decided. I contributed to developing the learning design itself, helping turn broad ideas into a practical cycle of Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test and Iterate, and Reflect.

Working with academic staff in this way changed how I understood student engagement. I was able to suggest activities, question assumptions, and respond to feedback as the framework developed. I also had to explain and justify my ideas, which helped me become more confident contributing to academic discussions rather than seeing myself only as a student receiving information.

This showed me that student partnership can go beyond consultation. Students can bring their own disciplinary knowledge and experience into curriculum development and contribute to decisions about how learning might take place.

Bringing the community into co-design

The second side of the partnership was working with E17 Films. We held a community-partner workshop to explore social entrepreneurship, the design cycle, and what meaningful impact should look like for both students and the community partner.

One clear example came from the Reflect stage of our design cycle. Feedback from our community partner highlighted the importance of reflection, adaptation and learning throughout the process, which strengthened reflection as a distinct stage in the framework. This showed me that co-design is not simply presenting a nearly finished idea and asking whether someone agrees with it. Meaningful involvement means giving community partners the opportunity to influence and change the direction of the work.

For me, this demonstrated the value of bringing community perspectives into the design process early community partners can challenge assumptions, help shape the problem being addressed, and identify what feels realistic, useful and meaningful in practice.

Where does AI fit?

Alongside developing the partnership model, we also considered where Generative AI could meaningfully support each stage of the learning experience. Rather than building the project around a specific AI tool, our focus was on identifying appropriate uses of GenAI while keeping human and community judgement central. For example, during the Ideate stage, students could use GenAI to generate alternative ideas alongside their own brainstorming, before critically evaluating those suggestions for relevance, feasibility, bias and limitations. In this way, AI is used to support exploration rather than provide the final answer.

For me, this connects directly to partnership. AI can generate possibilities, but it cannot replace the lived experience of a community partner or the judgement that develops through discussion between students, staff and communities.

What I will take forward

The project has given me opportunities to share our work through the UCL Education Conference, the RAISE Conference and the Queen Mary Festival of Education, where my poster on the developing learning framework was awarded third place out of 59 posters.

More importantly, it has changed how I think about participation. Meaningful partnership is not just about giving people a voice; it is about creating space for that voice to influence decisions.

My biggest takeaway is that students and community partners can contribute much more when they are involved early and treated as active partners. For future projects, I would encourage teams to build opportunities for students, staff and community partners to question, shape and revise the work together rather than wait until the end to ask for feedback.