Lesson 3: Becoming a Designer

This morning we had our third lesson with the class and after a couple of internal group meetings last week, we adapted our approach to the lesson by breaking away from working in groups.

We started by removing all the furniture from the classroom, enabling everyone to sit on the floor in a circle during the lesson and undertake an informal discussion about the project. After spending a short time introducing the role of an architect to the class (part of this involving presenting a selection of our past work so they could see our different ways of working and communicating), we went through a series of short discussions regarding our client, Mr. Mallaband and his role; the brief and what this entailed; and a timeline for the project allowing the students to better understand the limits.

Making a Timeline

We then expanded upon this, the students formulating questions regarding how the staff body would prefer their teaching spaces and what could be done to make them better. Soon the class was excited and the DT teacher, Miss Bovis, kindly allowed the students to pick their favourite teacher and quickly run and ask them the questions they had come up with. Whilst we were doing this, some of the teaching staff also popped in to see how we were getting on, some having a brief chat with us about their classrooms.

Though slightly skeptical about how this was going to work in the short time we had available, some of the answers the students returned with were very exciting and encouraging. Hopefully after we have managed to sift through these we will have some examples up.