Design researchers at the Alouettes school
For one year, we ran introductory design workshops in a primary school.
As part of the French school time reform, we designed and led introductory design workshops in a primary school. In our workshops, we encouraged students to adopt a research approach in which they were responsible for the progress of their work, individually or in groups. Over the terms, we imagined 8 different activities, inviting students to experiment with various techniques for producing shapes and to develop their projects over 7 to 9 weeks. Projects included, for example, building an electric city out of conductive modeling clay, creating typeface families, designing and making furniture from recycled materials, designing a crazy contraption (Rube Goldberg machines) or publishing a class book in monotype.
These workshops took place at the Les Alouettes school, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. We came in twice a week for a year, during the 2013-2014 school year, with students from all classes. These workshops were part of the Savanturiers program (CRI, Paris).
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These workshops gave birth to our first documentation prototype: La publication des chercheurs (The researchers’ publication). During our workshops, we saw how important it was to encourage students to keep traces of their processes, so they could learn from their experiences, their mistakes and their peers.
Juliette Mancini, who prepared and led the workshops with us.
After-school workshops organized as part of the Savanturiers, an initiative led by Ange Ansour and François Taddei, of the CRI.
The workshop on the Savanturiers website (in French).
