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redesign by De Matos Ryan and AOC. She
said: ‘Museums are really rethinking the old
orthodoxies.’ The enthusiasm, passion and
excitement their youthful co-designers have
brought to the project has proved its worth.
‘They see the MoC as a creative incubator for
the future, where they can discover change-
making and agency...The children have said
“we want to co-design the most joyful
museum in the world”,’ she added. Co-design
is now being appraised as a tool for the main
museum in Kensington.
But working with children and young
people is not always joyful and far from easy,
as MacDonald observed. Yes, young children
are often unencumbered by protocols or risk
aversion; however, ‘teenagers are not
unencumbered, and not necessarily joyful.
You can end up having massively beneficial
conversations but not if you don’t set things up
properly. The problem with education today is
that the answer is often put up on the board at
the beginning of a lesson. That’s the way theythat, after a decade of living in austerity
Britain, ‘good design is being stripped from
public spaces and schools. When do you learn
about good design if you are not seeing it
around you? Alongside that, many children
aren’t being given the opportunity to study art
and design in schools. Our emphasis is on
allowing children to build, not just have a say.
We believe it is possible to create situations
where young people genuinely have agency to
change the built environment for the better.’
For an example, she gave us a special project
she and Matthew Springett, her co-founder,
devised with a school for excluded children in
Hull 2017, with Hull being the UK’s City of
Culture. Working with a group of 14- to 16-year-
olds, they explored ideas of what kind of a space
they would most appreciate being added to their
already active allotment site. A ‘den cum shelter
cum classroom’ emerged, with multiple moving
and open-able parts to allow for diverse uses,
all modelled using paper and card. It was then
constructed over five days from timber frames
and panels. A video on the website http://www.
mattandfiona.org shows this thrilling and also
nerve-racking process in action: the children
took part in every aspect, including cutting the
timber panels to size, rollering rubber paint
over them to waterproof the exterior, then
fixing them to the frame with power tools, and
constructing benches and seats inside. The
project went on to win the AJ People’s Choice
Award in the Small Projects category.
Panellist Helen Charman, director of
learning and national programmes at the
V&A, has been discovering the benefits of
co-designing with children, aged eight to 14,
in its Museum of Childhood’s (MoC) extensive
are taught now. So they don’t want to question
their own ideas, they say “tell us the answer”.
Six-year-olds don’t – they jump in. Teenagers
don’t jump in. They have had their desire to
take risks discouraged...To do co-design takes
a huge amount of curation. You have to break
down the process of designing into something
that enables people to engage.’
And co-design is certainly not about
abdicating responsibility to any one group.
The benefits of bringing different voices into
the active design process is that the insights
are richer and broader. But the key to the
process is in the ‘co’ – it is a cooperative,
collaborative effort.
A downside is that genuine co-design is
time- and energy-consuming, and not every
client wants to pay for that. The arguments for
a really good co-design programme still need
to be clearly articulated in terms of value to the
project and benefits to the community. That
aside, one of the advantages, as MacDonald said,
is that: ‘When we present ideas saying they are
the children’s ideas, people listen in a way they
wouldn’t do normally.’ This extra buy-in can
work across the board – from the school head to
the person in charge of maintenance. ‘Everyone
works together to make it happen,’ she said. ‘We
have very ingrained systems in every aspect of
our lives. There are very few opportunities to
question decisions. This can create that chink
of light for something different to happen.’
Matt + Fiona are about to embark on their
biggest challenge yet: working with schoolkids
to design and build a ‘Mega-Maker Lab’ in the
old London Fire Brigade HQ for the Institute of
Imagination. It will open for the month of
August, for an anticipated 10,000 visitors.Right Located on an
allotment, the Matt + Fiona
project was designed to
feature multiple moving
and open-able parts
Below It was constructed
over five days from timber
frames and panels
RIGHT: FRENCH+TYE BELOW: PATRICK MATEER