Helen Hamlyn Research Fellow and RCA Architecture graduate Dr. Yanki
Lee met education manager Karine Waldron from Villiers High School two
years ago. The many layers of their partnership have involved some
1,300 pupils, teachers and staff from the school as well as students
and graduates from Industrial Design Engineering, Design Products,
Design Interactions and Printmaking.
Lee, whose research specialism is the tactics of Design
Participation, described the experience and the results of the
cooperation, in a much applauded paper entitled Teen-scape given at the Participatory Design Conference in Indiana recently.
Lee identified four types or steps in Design Participation during the
relationship with the school – innovation, collaboration, emancipation
and motivation – as designers and Villiers’s pupils and staff worked
together on projects including training, research,
installation-building and eventually designing a school playground for
teenagers.
“I have been looking at design participation tactics, how designers
interact with users. There are a whole load of tactics to do it – to
make users understand design and designers interact with users,” Lee
said.
“Designers often don’t know how to talk to users and are scared about
going to interview people. Tactics help the designers to design with
the user.”
Villiers school is enthusiastic about collaborations with outside
bodies - the school is a Technology College which has also forged links
with Imperial College London and Cambridge University. The RCA
partnership brought multi-faceted design into the mix, with both the
designers and the school benefitting from the relationship.
The collaboration began with a group of IDE students who were designing
a playground, the ‘dot°’project, for primary school children. They ran
a series of workshops for older children in Southall, training the
secondary school students at Villiers to become design assistants on
the project and gleaning ideas. Both pupils and design students were
very enthusiastic and Lee was particularly gratified that she was able
to extend the work to involve a group of Brazilian design graduates as
well as RCA students. The Brazilians ran projects using a variety of
design techniques, identifying what issues most mattered in the school
and how things could be improved.
“The whole school was very excited and engaged – teachers, staff and
students,” Lee said. The projects proved such a success that the school
was able to obtain funding for a group of RCA graduates from
communication, printmaking and engineering to teach design as part of
the curriculum to a large number of older students.
As Lee explained in her paper, “the students experienced both hands-on
practice and the stimulus of creative thinking for their future career
consideration and preparation,”. In addition, she found that the
teachers were also emancipated by design, realising the possibility of
influencing secondary school education through design thinking.”
Inspired by their experience the pupils initiated the next design move
themselves, with an eco-playground aimed at teenagers. They applied for
funding and when they discovered no specialist playground company could
provide what they wanted, they turned again to the RCA design students
for help. The result was a design commission for Clara Gaggero (IDE
graduate 2007), one of the original members from the ‘dot°’project. Now
a well used, much appreciated school facility, the project was unique
in that all the pupils of the school were consulted over the plans,
with workshops run, films and presentations made and the playground
built to the pupils’ specifications.
As Lee presented at the PDC2008 conference: “The role of designers and
users shifted in this project with the designer becoming the service
provider and enabling people to make their design ideas come true.”