Re-envisioning school architectures through sensous-affective data and speculative design: Ling Tan workshops’ at our partner school

Laura Trafí-Prats, Project PI and Senior Lecturer at the School of Health and Education at Manchester Metropolitan University

James Duggan, Project Co-PI (until July 2022) and Research Fellow at the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University

Introduction

In this blog, we discuss a three-day workshop led by artist and designer Ling Tan in which fourteen Year 12 students from our partner school participated in collecting and creatively responding to sensory data about their lived experience in the school building. More particularly, students collected data about the felt quality of habitual spaces like their form classrooms, hallways, the atrium, the sixth form hub, the sixth form stairs, the sixth form study room and others. Tan’s workshop came immediately after the six workshops discussed in the blog entry, ‘Co-equiring the multisensory ecologies of school buildings with a group of Year 12s’.  It continued and expanded the development of young people’s awareness of the built environment and the sensory ecology of the school building. It contributed to empowering young people in the use of sensor technology and to recognise the central role of the body in responding, altering and being altered by the environment.  

Tan is a UK based Singaporean designer and artist working within the fields of digital design, citizen-sensing practices and social engagement.  Also, a member of the prestigious Umbrellium studio, Tan works with diverse communities across the UK and internationally to devise projects using sensor technology and digital design to appraise their own experience of the environments, express opinions, develop collective mappings, creative responses, and enact activism around issues shaping young people’s lives in cities. These include public safety, air quality, climate change and gender safety. As a designer, Tan designs software, hardware, objects, the Internet of things (IoT), web platforms and installation to somehow disrupt the positivist and naturalised use of digital technologies and the ways we often oversee how they monitorise and shape everyday activity continuosly extracting sensous and embodied data (Gabrys, 2019). Tan retools sensor technologies to develop more informed forms of engagement around issues that are of particular interest to the lives of young people in particular environments. This is important to our project because smart school architecture often collects passive sensor data without student agency or conscious participation (de Freitas, Rousell & Jäeger, 2020). Research on the lived experience of smart schools remains underdeveloped and their potentials for educational transformation relatively unexplored (Tse et. Al., 2015). By engaging students through her knowledge of sensor technologies, and citizen-sensing research, Tan’s workshop contributed to the project’s focus of making young people more active in creatively imagining and managing their participation in the built environment.  

The workshop

Tan guided the students in a participative design process that started with data collection and data mapping of habitually used spaces in the school building. Students installed in their mobile phones an app designed by Tan, called SUPERPOWER, and were trained in its use. The app retools sensor technology embedded in the phones to collect and compile in a collective dashboard four types of data from these spaces: geolocation, photo-documentation, rating the quality of the space, and textual comments. An interesting aspect of the SUPERPOWER app is that the rating of a space can be generated by a gesture without directly looking into the app. According to Tan, this “is important when people don’t want to be conspicuous in public” (see, https://superpower.lingql.com/). The gestures can be designed by the students, revealing that spatial experience is embodied, intensive affective shaping habits movement and inhabitation as well as creative responses and resistances.

Images of the SuperPower app by Ling Tan

SUPERPOWER had to be adapted as part of the project, as it was not possible to use GPS inside the building. To create a way of geolocating the data Tan incorporated the school building floor plans in the app, added numbers to the different rooms and colours to distinguish the different floors. Thus, the photo-documentation, ratings and comments of particular spaces were linked to the map numbers.

The data collected was instantly uploaded to a dashboard, projected in the classroom and used for collective thinking and discussion with the students. This allowed to make tangible issues of space, materiality, temperature, light, organization, sound etc. that are sometimes difficult to describe or speak about but that shaped the students experience in the school and the ways spaces come to matter for the students.

Map of the ground floor with spaces numbered and color coded

Clippings of data collected by the students

In the last two days of the workshop, students used the data collected with the app to inform the design of cardboard prototypes devising potential architectural improvements in the bespoken spaces.

The prototypes were presented in a Concept Board that included: a) data that students had collected in the building, b) inspirational images in architecture and design that offer concrete ideas of how the materiality of their designs will feel in terms of colours, textures, light, shapes, patterns, flows, occupancy and other functionalities, and c) their prototype made with cardboard. The pupils presented their Concept Boards to the group and received feedback from Ling on how to take their ideas forward.  

References

De Freitas, E. Rousell, D. & Jaeger, N. (2020). Relational architectures and wearable space: Smart schools and the politics of ubiquitous sensation. Research in Education, 107 (1), 10-32. 

Gabrys, J. (2019). How to do things with sensors. University of Minnesota Press. 

Tse, H. M., S. Learoyd-Smith, A. Stables, and H. Daniels. 2015. “Continuity and conflict in school design: A case study from Building Schools for the Future.” Intelligent Buildings International 7(2-3), 64–82.