Design Yearbook 2017

Learning Space
Matthew Margetts & Cara Lund
Building on our previous linked research collaboration with Sunderland University’s Psychology Department, ‘Slides, Deckchairs and
Watercoolers’, we continue our exploration into the psychology behind places, spaces and furniture designed for interaction. This year the
focus was on increasing our understanding design which encourages people to physically engage with and modify a space/piece of adaptable
furniture.
Much modern workplace and education furniture is designed to be flexible. But it is only flexible if people engage with it and change it. Our
practice experience in British Council for Offices’ award winning workplace design suggests this rarely happens in reality or as intended. Thus
the central line of enquiry was to gain a better understanding of the psychological parameters, and having spatialized these, test an intervention
in the architecture school, before refining and testing in a real-life workplace.
Our students were challenged to work across disciplines, with real end users, to develop dynamic mapping tools and to undertake their own
reflective ‘live build’.
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