Design Workshop (& pizza)

Background to the briefs

We think it would be interesting to consider the experience of moving around schools, both in general and particularly in SEND environments. The idea occurred to us on our visit to Gretton School when it became clear that the corridors were important places in their own right, and not just as the means of getting from one place to another. Also, in our first event of the term, when we looked at the Government’s Building Bulletins, we noticed that all of the ‘guidance’ related to purely physical issues like widths and floor areas. If one understands autism as being about communication, behaviour, and sensory experiences then the experience of these spaces becomes an important design challenge.

Design Briefs

So the design task in our workshop will be to reenvisage circulation in SEND schools. Given that we only have a couple of hours to think about this, we do want to give you the choice of deciding the scale of the problem that you are comfortable addressing. So, in your groups, you can decide if to want to design: - a) the experiences of a pupil arriving at the school and making their way to their homebase classroom b) the experience of moving around a classroom and out into the playground or forest school c) the experience of moving to and around the dining room

Deliverables

We would like to suggest that you present your ideas as annotated concept drawings or diagrams, perhaps as two or three A3 sheets that can be put up on a whiteboard and explained to the other groups. We will launch the workshop with some images that we hope might spark your thinking. And somewhere we need to fit pizza in!