Joinedupdesignforschools

Workshops for pupils

The Innovation Unit sponsored a series of 50 workshops that took place at the V&A to coincide with the joinedupdesignforschools exhibition. The workshops involved over 1,000 pupils from 50 primary and secondary schools across the country, from Halifax to Plymouth, and gave them the opportunity to explore challenges and design issues in their schools.

The workshops gave pupils the opportunity to visit the exhibition and explore their ideas further with a designer to develop a design brief. In each workshop the pupil team was paired with a designer specialising in the area of the pupils' particular challenge, from landscape designers and architects to product designers and branding specialists.

The result is 50 new challenges, including social spaces, uniform, storage, learning spaces and security, pathways, 6th form spaces, reputation and identity, dining halls and canteens, colour, toilets and whole school plans.

Workshops at the joinedupdesignforschools Exhibition - Publication

A publication explaining the joinedupdesignforschools programme and showing the results of the joinedupdesignforschools workshops at the V&A is available to download.

 Workshops at the joinedupdesignforschools Exhibition (4 MB).

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This exhibition, which was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in March 2005 and has just completed a national tour, tells the story of how the Sorrell Foundation joined up pupils from all over Britain with some of the best designers in the world and did just that.

The Exhibition 

Pupils in over 60 schools were the clients, commissioning an array of over 50 international architects. 

This exhibition describes in detail how the results of this pioneering collaboration could change our schools in the future.

Find out more about joinedupdesignforschools by taking a look at the Sorrell Foundation website.

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Creative Thinking and Teaching Workshops

How do you invent a machine to improve education in your school using a table, a balloon and a lampshade? Or perhaps a milk bottle, an apple and a vase? Sounds strange - well yes, but it does stimulate creative thinking! This was just one of the exercises that participants on our Creative Thinking and Teaching workshops were asked to take part in. Their inventions were certainly creative and innovative. People really began to 'think outside the box' and it didn't take long either. Although the workshops were only an hour long, there was probably more exciting thinking going on than happens in most places of work in a week.

The workshops were run by The Innovation Unit as part of the joinedupdesignforschools exhibition run by the Sorrell Foundation and partly funded by The Innovation Unit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Teachers were invited from all over the country and as there were only 20 places in each workshop they were rapidly oversubscribed! 

Find out more about joinedupdesignforschools by taking a look at the Sorrell Foundation website.

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