Michelle Wong

Fledge

Fledge is a co-design support panel for prospective offboarding students, directing next steps for student and program via empathetic and think tank discussions. Sparked from the experiences and unmet needs of outgoing transfer students, fledge operates as both a support program and incubator to foster individual and program growth, extending "A Community for You, Wherever You Land.”For more information, visit the fledge process book and pre-demo (Drop Out Drop In, created for the Student Association of Industrial Designers in collaboration with Jared Ireland) linked below.

“In the past six years, I have left two university programs and founded one student association. Since completing my first program transfers, I’ve been an informal point of reference and voice of support for other offboarding students.I created fledge to create a support system for the extreme category of unsatisfied students: those who wished to leave the program altogether. The Industrial Design program in particular has greatly shifted its curriculum beyond its present marketing, creating discrepancies between student expectation and curriculum actuality. Fledge builds upon these unmet expectations promote both a future-planning structure for students, and co-design input for the affected program curriculums.Fledge combats the myth that “dropping out” is a decision to be made alone, in secret, to instead bring together offboarding students from all programs and years to voice opinions in discussion, identifying common grievances and new ideals across the academic departments. These conversations can branch out into future-planning, extracurricular expansions, business incubators, and extracurricular transfers, all executed with a high level of decision confidence.Fledge provides a low-pressure co-design addition to OCAD University’s current student offboarding aids (voluntary surveys and academic advising), while supporting and encouraging student agency and decision confidence throughout the process.Fledge possesses the framework to connect offboarding with onboarding via expansion to the university network, growing inter-university collaboration and co-design. At a broader level, fledge panels can be applied to other communities of incoming and outgoing members in neighborhoods and workplaces. While offboarding supports are largely overlooked outside digital platforms, fledge emphasizes the importance of community support, emphasizing connection at the user’s points of transition and exit.”