After a weekend of burnout last week—torn between decisions, redefining my direction, and yes, constantly going back and forth between facing and avoiding my research—I’ve come to one clear realization: I need to start talking about my ideas with others.
My interest with urbanism and co-design is still high, as a person who lives from one city to another, I keep on comparing Jakarta with some big cities I’ve ever visited which seems to be unmatched. Not before I talked with Germán and Angélica, both are friends of Simon’s who are the experts in urban planning and architecture. I heard a lot of similarity between Bogotá and Jakarta, especially when it comes to overpopulation, slums, and informal urban sprawl development. Mobility and density are the major issues in Bogotá, which also reflected in Jakarta but with less air pollution issues due to environmental benefits from the hills that surround the city.
Because of this information, I begin to do research more with some books that might related to the discourse:
- What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion Book by Silvio Lorusso
- Invisible Women Book by Caroline Criado Perez
- Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation Book by Ezio Manzini
- Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need Book by Sasha Costanza-Chock
Like playing an adventure game, these books made me had a new side quest to explore, which are co-design and the importance of play. And guess who is gaining more ideas and directions now? me!

Narrowing Down The Subject Area to Urban Kampung
I acknowledge that the complexity in using my hometown as the subject area might be really challenging to solve the problem. Therefore, I narrowed down the area to become more specific; urban village or urban ‘kampung’ area. Kampung means village in English, it is a dense-overpopulated area in the city where most of the working class are living. The urban kampung sprawl has become sporadic across the city to the fringe side of Jakarta.
I was actually live closely in the urban kampung where this place is being gentrified with the growth of skyscrapers and modernized buildings. As working class, they are supposed to be the people who flourished the economy of Jakarta but apparently the ones who are suppressed more rather than the low-income society or the higher ones.
People in urban kampung giving the color and variety in the city. Similar to the ‘alley cats’ who live in the downtown of the city, urban kampung residents are striving in the alley with their informal jobs, community bonds and dreams. These people are known to have a stronger bond with each other due to closed neighborhood, and they tend to like ‘nongkrong’ or ‘to hangout’ with their community on their leisure time.
Thus, I took nongkrong to another level; going to conferences.
Talked Out My Ideas With Many People Did Help, Apparently.
Things get a little bit of fun on Monday when I joined the CES Notion Gathering with Notion called “Build Better”. It is a Notion-powered business event designed for students with big ideas and no clue where to begin (yet, or not at all), or want to build better (yep, I literally copied from their Instagram caption, lol).
In the conference, I was able to hear how people manage their project using Notion and making fortune through informal job like freelancers. Although maybe a lot of people has known it, but I guess this is a new thing for me. Which inspired me to take action about it. The gathering also providing us with networking session and un-conference session where we can share and validate our idea. I thankfully was able to share my idea with people and with a validation to “just do it” first without overthinking it. Because, if you keep on having the same idea over and over again, so to speak, it might be the right one.
Facilitating people to imagine their own habitat through design seemed to be a really important playground to play. Professor Bobi Setiawan, an expert and lecturer in urban planning from Universitas Gadjah Mada, told me in our discussion about the essential role of artists and intermediaries in bridging the gap between academic urban planning and the lived experiences of residents, especially in facilitating the expression and appreciation of community imagination through various forms. Since the overpopulation makes the government encouraged their citizen to have autonomy in imagining their own lives, according to Rahul Patel — Course Leader of CCI in CSM— we need to have understanding on people’s lived experiences and its ecology, in order to give the accurate system or design that suitable for themselves.
After talking with a lot of experts, I decided to talk to the local authorities in the urban village called Cipadu in Indonesia. It is a district that is located next to my district in Jakarta’s suburban which is known by textile industry and bedding convection. And what I understood from my discussion with the local authority in Cipadu, the problems spread around waste management, air pollution from self-burning trash, youth unemployment and slums. Which is far more complex than I thought this would be. The government had tries many things to employed strategies that could reduce the issue and improve the wellbeing of the neighborhood, but the result still not meet the ends.
Maybe it is the time to frame and reframe the issue using creativity. But, if the problem is too serious, how to make a creative solution out of it?
A Lesson From Birmingham Design Week
I realized how packed and crazy week I had after talking, discussing, researching and learning from a lot of publication and experts about my project. But, I had signed up for Birmingham Design Week (BDF) Conference 2025 so it means I REALLY have to go.
I almost feel like cancelling my plan, but turned out it was the best decision I made to show up. The major highlight of the conference’s theme was about “Play” and how it is important in design industry.
Taken from designweek site about BDF, “play is not the antidote to serious design work – it creates the conditions where bold and impactful design gets made.” It is not making serious problem less serious, but how to allow imagination to flow using exploration and curiosity to give creativity a bigger room to solve bigger problems.
My personal favorite is when George Clarke from The Guardian giving a talk about playfulness at work. He mentioned how we need to create our “building” so we can paint however we like but maintained the same structure and form. This is a metaphor on how a building can be our knowledge or tools to bridge the gap between problems and creativity.
Cited (again) from designweek site, “Play doesn’t make something less serious,” he said. “It makes it more human, more open, more real.” And without play, George Clarke believes, designers “risk mistaking repetition for progress.”
“Play is not a luxury, or a nice-to-have,” he said. “It’s a strategy – a design system for thinking differently.”
Enjoying the process is indeed important, but how to make it a playground is a challenge.
Now that I already understand the gameplay, I kinda need to build the boardgame (or the building as Clarke’s said), the second player and definitely the story.
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