Crossing Contexts: Applying a System for Collaborative Investigation of School Space to Inform Design Decisions in Contrasting Settings

This paper presents a system for participatory appraisal and idea generation by a school’s users to enable interdisciplinary collaboration between educators and architects, producing school designs appropriate to the needs of the school at the time and into the future. Our uses of this system in two contrasting educational settings in England and in Uruguay are described. We show how the visual-spatial activities supported the educators to consider education in spatial terms, build a shared understanding and produce representations that could be used to convey ideas to architects and designers. Given that participation and cross-disciplinary collaboration in school design is known to be challenging, but vital, we consider the features of our approach that enabled its success and make it viable on each and every occasion of school design or redesign. Further, addressing the critiques of attempted international transfer of architectural designs, educational policies, practices and buildings, we argue that our system avoids these problems through seeking to transfer not a project but the means to enable participation in a project.

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