While co-ordinating a design project to determine how their school should be refurbished, service design agency Engine encouraged the staff and students at Walker Technology College in Newcastle to go off site and look at examples of schools that did things differently. The OurNewSchool team visited the Lifestyle Academy at Newcastle College, a training facility for beauty, sport, tourism and hospitality students.
A spa, gym, restaurant and hair & beauty salon are all open to the public, so students get to learn to do things in practice, rather than just in theory. The building also features a dedicated flight attendant training room and a purpose built biomechanics centre for the study of sports science.
For Walker, the Academy was an interesting and inspiring example of a dynamic learning environment where students interface with members of the public and where learning happens alongside commercial business activities. As an example of best practice, the team gathered information and photographs to show at a Senior Leadership meeting at Walker to challenge people’s thinking about the subject and stimulate further debate.
A visit to Dance City, a national dance agency training facility in Newcastle, also proved inspiring. Its manager described the effort that had gone into designing the social architecture of Dance City. The designers wanted to create a building that was welcoming and could accommodate a wide variety of people with an interest in dance. The co-design team from Walker were given a behind-the-scenes tour of this learning and performance centre from the dressing rooms to the boiler room. They listed all the spaces, people, activities and things that together made up the experience at Dance City. They then compared what happened at Dance City with Walker and decided they needed to map what happened at Walker so they could decide what aspects of the school helped or made it difficult for students to learn.
Design process
After the visits, says Schaeper, the students, ‘came up with a huge range of opportunities and design challenges, which we then fed back to our co-design team. We then picked ones that affect the future of learning, learning styles, learning throughout the year, and throughout school life from year 7 to 14.’
The service design agency helped the school develop and use a series of tools to help their thinking and planning and to get people involved in solving problems and exploring opportunities. These included a group activity using a grid to list spaces, people, activities and objects in the school. Visualising the problem is a good first step, says the designers. After understanding how to deconstruct a space and critique it, the groups could identify problems that they hadn’t seen before and try to unravel why things worked the way they did and what had influenced the design decisions that somebody must have made to come up with the product in that format.
Having decided to look for a way to support and encourage useful learning at all stages of school life, the design team moved on to help the school team develop and refine their ideas into a final brief for an architect.
Four steps to good designs
The design team followed a four-step process to help guide the co-design activities at Walker.
- Discovery: this first step is about finding things out. Listening and looking at what’s happening, generating insights and identifying needs.
- Generation: this phase is about having ideas, exploring opportunities and developing concepts.
- Synthesis: this stage is about bringing ideas together. Learning by doing, and making decisions as a team can turn ideas into practical solutions.
- Enterprise: the final phase is all about making sure things happen. Planning to make the solution sustainable is vital and considering problems means great concepts are more likely to become real.