Who you work with#
Dream a Dream, as described in Brief 01. This problem joins two of their questions: designing spaces that support the Thriving journey outside scheduled sessions, and designing spaces that invite young people to change them.
The situation#
A Thriving Centre runs structured sessions at set times. Outside those hours the building is a building. Dream a Dream believes the important things — friendship, experimenting, belonging — happen in the unstructured time, and that the young people should be shaping the place, not visiting it.
What is going wrong#
A room designed by adults for a programme signals who it belongs to. Fixed furniture, locked cupboards and finished walls all say: this is ours, you are a guest. Young people behave accordingly.
Dream a Dream’s words for the shift they want are moving young people “from participants to co-creators”. Right now the physical space works against that.
Why it is not fixed yet#
Handing over a space sounds easy and is not. Someone still has to be responsible when something breaks, when two groups want the same room, or when a decision goes badly. Most attempts collapse into either adults quietly taking control back, or a free-for-all that staff then have to clean up. The design has to survive both.
Skills and Expertise#
- Branch — Mechanical, and any branch with an interest in design. One of the few problems in this pool with a physical build at its centre.
- Technical skills — Fabrication with basic tools, modular and flat-pack design, material selection and costing, safety assessment, prototyping.
- Other skills — Participatory design, facilitation, writing rules people will actually follow.