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    News: Design Participation – Cooperation in Action

  • The Playground at Villiers High School
    The Playground at Villiers High School
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  • 17 November 2008: A chance meeting on a boat trip has led to a fertile and productive collaboration between the Royal College of Art (RCA) and a secondary school in Southall.
    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.”

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