Year | 2022
Location | Arbourthorne Primary School, Sheffield
Clients | Arbourthorne Community Primary School
For our Live Project the client tasked us with developing a design proposal for a workshop space that would allow children and adults to make and tinker. Our group went on to partake in and develop a series of engagement activities that would allow us to receive user feedback for our project.
Over the course of 3 weeks, a variety of engagement activities were held at the school, enabling us to engage both the parents and children. With the intention of gathering constructive feedback to structure creative design choices, the knowledge gained from the engagements directly fed into our group discussions and design ideas each week.
The approach to our users was pivotal in our design process, developing ideas that were influenced by genuine feedback. The collection of user responses, client feedback, and group discussions saw us develop 3 main outcomes, separated into 3 phases for short, medium, and long-term solutions for the client.
These phases consisted of 4 main outputs:
- A client document to outline our design work
- An engagement document to outline our feedback and suggest new engagement solutions
- A Doll’s-house model which could be used by the school to involve the children and parents
- A pre-application document, sent to the council to receive advice on our design choices and transmit these to the client.
During the project, we also connected with the Snapdragon Live Project group to liaise with their client. Considering a potential benefit of connecting the school with a community company that could supply waste scrap material for the making space.
The client was then given a range of information documents that provide all of the necessary information regarding their needs, giving the client an external viewpoint which they did not originally have access to. Consequently, changing their initial thoughts and giving them a constructive and feasible approach to their brief.
This was evident from how our group expanded the original brief from the idea of a container unit conversion to a 3-phase process diagram that outlines different approaches for a making space based on budget, scale, the re-use of existing spaces, and engagement at the school.
Being involved with the school staff, parents, children, and external consultants produced a community-focused and engaging group project, concentrating on user feedback and a co-design process that strived to create meaningful outcomes.
Instagram: @maker_mindset_ssoa
Credits:
Mentor: Danni Kerr
Client: Arbourthorne Community Primary School
Location: Arbourthorne Primary School, Sheffield
Students: Bareera Borhan, Lucas Spence, Yitong Wang, Patricia Sangalang, Matthew Hallet, Georgina Henwood, Shubael Idowu, Neha Batny, Fan Gao, Avani Joshi, Guangyi Zeng, Jiehong Zhuang, Sam Cook.
