Staff research and student-led participatory workshops

Increasingly within design, creatives and researchers are moving towards making with people rather than for them. This builds on areas such as participatory design or co-design but also has a foot in community or participatory arts practice. Along with members of the public engaging with Green Space Dark Skies from a performative perspective, the graphics teams at AUB wanted them to work with our students to learn about technology, hands-on-making and sustainability. The graphic design students had the opportunity to work on a research project, the focus of which was:

■ Participatory making workshops using craft and technology with members of the public;

■ Exploring how marginalised groups can engage with maker culture on their own terms;

■ Embedding approaches of prototyping, participation and co-designing kits within the outputs of the unit being studied by the students, and seeing from a pedagogical perspective what their experience was.

Dr Emilie Giles worked with the students to develop a pool of design workshops, which took a participatory making approach (Twigger Holroyd and Shercliff, 2014). These involved using elements such as conductive paint, DIY electronics, origami and model making, to inspire participants to engage with nature and sustainability and in doing this be more creative and crafty, whilst also learning about technology.

As a project starting point, the AUB graphics team posed the following question to the students:

How could we help individuals build a deeper connection to the living world, enabling them to become future ambassadors of the environment and helping them live more sustainably?

As a way to answer this, participants needed to discuss how making activities might influence them in taking a more active part in fostering this connection. Previous research has shown that taking a participatory making approach can help participants open up and discuss their views and feelings about certain situations, as opposed to just taking part in an interview, and so a workshop approach seemed the right method for addressing the research questions.

As Price (2015) discusses, talking whilst making (particularly crafting) allows for ‘thoughtful creativity’.

Along with the main research question, the following ones were also important to answer:

■ How does creative participatory making encourage conversations in the moment for marginalised groups?

■ Does taking part in a creative activity in the rural environment help people feel more connected to it, who might previously had low engagement with it?

■ By combining design and technology in a crafting based workshop, do barriers break down people’s perception of their skills?

■ Did participation in a crafting workshop increase the confidence of those involved to mobilise skills aligned to design and technology?

This project saw the students design kits for the participants to build, these ranged from Nesting Nooks – a laser cut bird house which contains an LED that blinks when there is no inhabitant – to Power Flowers –origami flowers which can be used as a lamp in a dark space. All projects were educational, with these two examples teaching participants about bird species and their habitats, and about endangered species of flowers – all situated in the UK.

Prototyping

The students went through a rigorous prototyping process to design and produce their kits, taking a reflection-in-action approach (Schön, 1983) by being encouraged to critically reflect on their designs as they took the time to make up their kits, making changes accordingly based on their own making experiences and that of test participants.

Dr Alex Blower, Access and Participation Manager at AUB led on the outreach element of the project, along with Activate’s Caroline Suri, Producer in theatre, education and outreach. Together, they focused on recruiting participants who might not always have the chance to engage in the arts, with these people including foster families, those from a lower income background and young people with specific learning differences or learning needs. This meant that a diverse range of participants were able to attend the workshops and engage with the activities.

The outreach element of the project was incredibly important, with ties with the local community being strengthened, and new connections made. Dr Alex Blower said of the process:

“The Access and Participation team at AUB were delighted to work with our partners at Activate Performing Arts and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council in providing funded transportation to the Green Space Dark Skies event for young people in foster care and their families.

We are very proud of the connection we have with our local community, and this was a fantastic example of us working in partnership to provide opportunities for young people which may otherwise have been unavailable.”

Positive feedback

The workshops were received well by members of the public, who wrote their reflections of the process on labels with comments such as:

“Very relaxed experience. Good use of tech to promote a connection with nature. Well done team.”

This approach was used by Twigger Holroyd (2013) within her PhD research, where participants at festivals were asked to write notes as they crafted. This approach was chosen for feedback as the research team wanted a way for participants to be able to record their thoughts in a way which was nonintimidating and felt in tune with the crafting nature of the activity. After writing the labels, they were each attached to the structure of the workshop tent, as an array of memories from the process.

The students were also positive about their experience on the project with feedback such as:

“I loved working on the live brief especially with Emilie and my group, seeing the process of making a workshop and having the member of the public participate really sparked an interest.”

Along with:

“I thoroughly enjoyed the E-textile workshop, it was something I have never experienced before and an experiment that engaged me with both analogue and technical materials. Though I’m not a fan of coding, found the workshop simple and easy to follow, while being fun and creative. used the knowledge to develop a successful and popular workshop during the Green Space Dark Skies event.”

Clockwise from top: ‘Spin Mill’ workshop (Student team: Bryni Boxford-Faulkner, Luke Street and Vajune Strazdaite)

‘The Light Story’ Prototype (Student team: Olivia Allan, Harriet Lee and James Wilen)

‘Nesting Nooks’ Prototype (Student team: Sara Jayne, Mehera Kalantari, Eve Sawyer and Rosie Young)

Right: AUB Graphic Design staff and students

Photos © Emilie Giles and Alice Stevens

Taking a participatory making approach – not only through the students working with members of the public to build the kits, but also with the academics working with the students to design the workshops and kits, as opposed to giving them a strict brief –embodied the ideas of ‘mutual learning’ (Bratteteig, 1997) and ‘social constructivism’ (Vygotsky, 1968). These are important within participatory design and pedagogical theory as it’s about making everyone in the process equal, learning with and from each other whilst collaborating.

To make design more democratic as a practice, its vital that student designers are mentored to not only be user-centered, but also participatory. The Green Space Dark Skies workshops are an example of how this can happen and how both designers and participants can feel equally empowered and have a sense of their own creative agency.

References

Bratteteig, T. (1997) ‘Mutual Learning: Enabling cooperation on systems design’. In: Braa, K. and Monteiro, E. Proceedings from the IRIS 20 Information Systems Research Seminar Oslo, Norway, pp. 1-20.

Price, L. (2015) ‘Knitting and the City’, Geography Compass Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 81-95.

Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals think in action, New York, NY, Basic Books.

Twigger Holroyd, A., and Shercliff E. (2014) ‘Making with others: working with textile craft groups as a research method’. In: The Art of Research V Conference: Experience, Materiality, Articulation.

5th Art of Research Conference 26-27 Nov 2014, Helsinki, Finland. School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University.

Twigger Holroyd, A. (2013) Folk Fashion: amateur re-knitting as a strategy for sustainability. Unpublished PhD thesis, Birmingham City University.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1968) Thought and language (newly revised, translated, and edited by Alex Kozulin). Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.