Living Spaces: Prototyping

Students have been working on coming up with ideas and prototyping. They've been moving backwards and forwards between those, after getting feedback (testing).

Student shave been busy brainstorming ideas for their living spaces units and sketching out initial ideas. Students have come up with all sorts of crazy and wonderful ideas to suit their clients needs.  We started off by having them put their ideas on paper and most jumped straight to designing their space and the layout - if we did this again, we would have them start off with a brainstorm, before committing their ideas into a defined floor plan! However, they really impressed us with their designs. Students also had a lot of time to give feedback to each other. They worked with different students every time they received feedback, and used different methods, including the ladder of feedback.

Helen reminding them of different rungs on the ladder of feedback!

The ideas included: a star shaped bed for the rap star, a house to suit the giant, with accommodations for human guests (a giant sofa and a mini sofa!), a tower with a telescope for the astronomy loving snow-queen, a giant entertainment system for the teenager vampire and more!

We found that students were limiting themselves by committing to paper, so let them re-design their prototype with Lego, Pipe Cleaners, Paper Plates and more! I was super impressed with how different all their designs looked, as well as the symbolism and how they described the different parts of their spaces. Some of the students who are used to making everything very accurate and detailed initially found this a little hard, but once they realized that their prototypes could be super rough, they relaxed and had fun creating! Students were really 'in the zone' during these sessions - they showed an incredible amount of focus and were super engaged in the activity (who doesn't like making their ideas visible with Lego!)

Our next step is students will be creating short videos to describe their client, their needs, their ideas and their prototype designs.  Watch this space to see what they come up with!

You can read about how we introduced the unit here, how we showed the students how creativity and play helps students design here and how they started understanding their client and their client's needs here.