empowering childhood creativity
Co-creating creative
Pre-school spaces
The open studio project worked on the spatial design of a studio that children can use independently, without adult guidance.
project phases:
1. expert conversations
We started our research by clustering our findings on meaningful learning experiences into six characteristics that were further developed to act as a guide through the interviews we conducted with a diverse group of 4 education professionals. We transformed the characteristics into two provocative learning scenarios, whereby a significant role concerning the spatial aspects of learning emerged.
2. provocative scenarios
Camouflaged as serious project proposals we presented these “Provonarios” to the experts and from their instant objections, core qualities of learning spaces stake out. All participants were debriefed after the session.
3. cultural probes / playful co-creation
To also gain insights into the direct experiences and perceptions of the children themselves, we decided to actively invite them into the design process as well. We created a probe kit that contained playful tasks on the spatial concepts of the children and tested it within a preschool group of 3 - 5-year-olds.
4. divergent brainstorming
Both the interviews and the probes pointed out an interesting dualism between the need for both independence and structure. We generated 100 brief design ideas based on that insight and later on developed one idea for further implementation. The main aims of that concept were: a central shared material base facilitating collaboration and individual spaces for concentrated independent work.
5. experience prototyping
By building a 1:1 prototype we were able to directly test our concept within the preschool environment. The testing worked very well as the children reacted to the prototype as we had proposed and the preschool actually changed the studio setup after our project was completed.
6. design principles
We summed up the project by generating 5 design principles for cooperative and self-determined learning spaces, that were distributed during our annual exhibition.
