Design process

A young-person led approach

At the start of the project, estate manager Ronke Ayoola wrote to young people on the estate to invite them to meet the designers Snug & Outdoor. At the first meeting the young people showed the design team around the estate, pointing out what they liked and did not like and what they felt was important about their space. Young people were also able to use the project’s website to give anonymous feedback to the design team.

The project team invited six teenagers to become paid volunteers for the project. Their role was to facilitate the development of the designs and encourage other young people to get participate in the design process.

Creative experiments

Snug & Outdoor set up an ‘experimental playground’ with ramps, large wooden cubes, canopies and platforms for the young people to create spaces and territories from. The playground was set up on the actual site for the teenage space, so the young people could easily relate the spaces they constructed to the final design. Snug & Outdoor observed the process and gathered ideas from the young people but did not intervene or push design ideas of their own.

Some of the final design features can be directly linked to ideas seen in the experimental phase. For example, the mound echoes the temporary ramp that was put up in this phase, while the inside/outside sculpture mirrors the way the wooden cubes were used by the young people.

One of the project’s guiding principles was not to dismiss any of the young people’s ideas, but to allow them to work through the possibilities for themselves. When the idea of using graffiti for the signage was raised, Snug & Outdoor and the estate management board arranged a graffiti project so the young people could pursue this concept. The young people felt that the work produced did not give the message they wanted about their space, so decided to use simple but slick signage produced by Snug & Outdoor.