“Around the Corner”: MA students co-create bench with local young people
- Written byAlex Cuncev
- Published date 09 November 2023
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'Around the Corner', a Challenge Lab initiative at University of the Arts London, offered MA students as well as local young people aged between 15 and 17 the opportunity to gain practical knowledge in designing for and with the public by co-creating new public realm seating. The aim of the project was to offer first-hand experience in co-designing with the community whilst exploring material reuse and sustainable production methods for the design process. Coupled with considering inequities in access to public and open space, 'Around the Corner' aimed to re-examine the consultation approach in the design of the public realm.
Challenge Lab is a knowledge exchange initiative based at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon College of Arts. Concerned with applying socially engaged practice to tackle global societal challenges at the local level, it supports creative, collaborative problem solving between academics, the local community, students, graduates and key external experts. Challenge Lab is open to both research and graduate projects looking to connect research to practice.
'Around the Corner' – one of Challenge Lab’s projects – was steered by 2nd year MA Global Collaborative Design Practice students Sanaa Fatima Asim and Victor Hwang. Firstly, Sanaa and Victor, who acted as “Designers in Residence” for the project, ran ideation workshops with young people from Southwark’s Youth Parliament and local Arts and Design Foundation courses. For the second stage of the project, the 2 Designers in Residence collaborated with 10 young people from Southwark and Lambeth to co-create seating ideas, test concepts and produce full scale prototypes during a month-long After School Club.
The project resulted in the creation of oblong benches with a flexible modular design, perfect for encouraging conversation. To mitigate industrial waste and reuse materials, the benches are made of reclaimed hardwood and aluminium scaffolding. The group collaborated with The Remakery, a co-working workshop space in Brixton that focuses on material recycling and reuse, as hosts for the workshops, and as project partners working with industry residents Mark, Jasmine, Callum and Phil to explore and source materials. The final bench was produced by designer-makers Callum Sida-Murray and Phil Dolman with support from the project team.
Sanaa and Victor received a small fee for leading the project, which also counted towards their MA Final Major Design Project.
The project is permanently housed at The Hub, Camberwell College of Arts space for the community in the heart of Peckham. We caught up with Sanaa and Victor to hear more about 'Around the Corner' and their take-aways from the project.
Hi Sanaa and Victor, congratulations on 'Around The Corner'. You collaborated with young people for this project, can you tell us about this experience?
Sanaa: I really enjoyed it… it ended up being a challenge in ways I didn’t expect, especially about language and framing, making sure we distinguished ourselves from the power-dynamic of school or class... I really enjoyed co-designing with them.
Victor: They approached the methods we had created in ways that we couldn’t have imagined and I was inspired by how engaged they were with lots of the aspects of designing for public space, designing for accessibility, trying to make spaces warm and welcoming. [The young people] were leading lots of those discussions.
What do you think are the benefits of co-designing with a community?
Sanaa: One thing that we really focused on [for this project] was how can we incorporate not just teenagers and their thoughts but their lived experience of public spaces. The reason we did that was because that knowledge, that lived experience, is something we won’t ever know. We unlocked a new set of knowledge and perspectives to work within. I think what too often happens if you’re designing and you’re coming at it from the outside is you can overlook all of that. [This approach] doesn’t only create solutions that are better suited, but it also creates that reciprocal relationship with whatever is designed with the community, and that creates pride and a desire to maintain it.
Victor: For me, when public space is only designed by a small group of experts it ends up becoming very homogenous and similar and that sort of similarity can exclude certain groups of people. By having a more engaged and deeper co-design process with the community we can break some of that, and it can generally be more useful and more welcoming.
What new skills do you think you learned?
Sanaa: I think it really demystified how to make things happen. How do you actually collaborate with people and get something going as a self-directed project. This is the first time for me completely designing the workshop, running it and synthetising everything that came out of it, being part of the whole process… so I learnt a lot about that.
Victor: To relax. With a process like this, the more you can relax into it and go with what the participants are engaged with, and what they want to do, the better it is for them and the better the outcome ends up being.
How do you think your skills benefited the young people?
Victor: [They experienced] thinking through making rather than planning meticulously and then making a thing, which I think was a different perspective on art and design than a lot of them had worked with before.
Sanaa: A few of them especially were not so familiar with that style of learning. And it’s quite empowering when you know how to do a skill that seemed so difficult before.
Victor: I can also give a big shout out to the other people who helped to facilitate our workshops, Callum, Jas and Phil… I’m a big believer in the kind of education where you’re working alongside more experienced people… You could see in the workshops that they got a lot out of bouncing ideas off them and being pushed and challenged in that way.
How did you approach sustainability in the project?
Victor: We worked closely with The Remakery. In the final product, the wooden cladding is all reclaimed. And underneath is a scaffolding frame made from standard scaffolding so it could always be taken apart and repurposed if the bench reaches the end of its life.
What are you taking away from the experience?
Sanaa: Coming into this Master’s degree, I didn’t have a huge design background and, in my head, design is about whatever you make, the object. Of course what’s been made is amazing, the bench is super cool, but I find the bigger value of this project… is the process. So, I think it’s helped me learn more about the ins and outs of trying out different methodologies and developing that process. I think it’s made me a bit more confident so that whatever else I go on to do I know that I can start thinking about the process and I know how to go about it.
Victor: It’s made me realise how many people are willing to come along for the ride if you’ve got an interesting project and probably made me a bit more confident in being able to start something similar in the future, it’s a lot less daunting.
'Around the Corner' was exhibited in UAL’s presentation at Eureka at London Design Biennale in June and was on display as part of 'Microclimates: MA Global Collaborative Design Practice' at Peckham Levels. Its final home is the The Hub at Camberwell College of Arts, available for everyone to use from November 2023.