Warren Comprehensive and Sarah Wilton

Duration: 1 day
Teacher: Colin Constable (Head of Department)
Students: Year 10

Interior designer Sarah Wilton, of Bennett Interior Design, was matched with Warren Comprehensive by the Design Council.

Activity

Sarah began by showing students sketches, ideas boards and photographs of finished interiors as well as examples of unusual and innovative designs from across the whole design spectrum.

Based on the recent national initiative 'Classrooms of the Future', Sarah devised a competition, complete with a mocked up letter from Essex County Council, inviting students to submit designs for a multi-functional classroom.

The competition brief specified that entries must be from teams and that each team could submit as many ideas as it wished. The class were also told that the 'judging panel' (the D&T staff and Sarah) would require prototype models, drawings, ideas sheets and a five-minute presentation from each team - by 2.30pm.

The students had just ten minutes to complete their first task: to imagine they were setting up a brand new interior design practice specialising in educational design and invent a name and a slogan for it.

Then, to focus their brainstorming, Sarah highlighted five key issues and questions to be considered:

• How the classroom could reflect modern technologies
• How it could engage students and make them excited about learning
• How to make the space flexible enough to change its function, for example to become a common room once lessons had finished
• What role a teacher might have in a 21st century classroom
• How to build in sustainability, for example in lighting, heating and use of recycled materials
   

Results

It was clear from the presentations that uniformity was out and colour and technology were in. But it wasn't all hi-tech - one group's design featured plants and floor-to-ceiling windows to increase natural light.

Ideas to include multi-functionality included revolving walls that could either open the classroom onto a communal space or onto the outside, and a computer bench with monitors mounted on a screen that folded down to create an all-purpose work surface.

Feedback

Designer

Sarah said she now realised how demanding teaching can be. 'You have to be on the ball the whole time,' she remarked. She had wanted to give students an insight into the industry and, judging by their surprised reactions to the scope of both design and what a designer has to do, she felt confident that she had been successful.

Teacher

Colin said the benefit of working with a designer had been to 'keep me in touch with techniques and attitudes towards design'.

The benefits to his class were also clear: 'We don't tend to do much teamwork, but we should do,' he commented. He felt that, having succeeded at working at such a quick pace to meet a very tight deadline, the students had left feeling 'quite proud of themselves'.

Students

'I enjoyed it a lot,' remarked Clare of her experience, 'we don't get to do a lot of hands-on stuff at school.' She felt that working as a team and working on a whole concept rather than a single product had made the day special.