In my master’s project, I am interested in researching the different challenges our modern democracy is facing and creating a design response to these issues in order to inform, remind and provoke new perspec tives in my audience. How can I facilitate for better dialogues between people with conflicting opinions and values in order to strengthen our deliberative democracy?

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History has shown us that even strong democracies can deteriorate, cease to exist or get replaced with totalitarian regimes. In recent times, there are many tendencies in which may be concerning for our demo cracy. One of them is that 40% of young Norwegians are hesitant to express themselves in fear of negative reactions from others, according to a survey posted by NRK in 2023. The expression of a multitude of diverging opinions is crucial for a democracy to work in its proper way, even if the opinions are controver sial, challenging or even untrue. Therefore, I wanted to understand what types of opinions young people fear discussing with others, and how we might debate them collectively through different approaches and tools. The project is situated between different kinds of design traditions and approaches, like for instance discursive design, social design and political design.

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Hedda Halvorsen Berland