Dott 07

One group above all others has a stake in the transition to sustainability: today's school students. Are we giving them enough leeway to shape the world they will live in? Following a visit to the Dott Festival, the debate began with a review of two Dott projects.

In ECO Design Challenge, Dott 07 invited year eight students across North East England to map their school’s ‘carbon and ecological footprint’. Having identified which aspects of their footprint are most wasteful, they then proposed the redesign of an aspect of their school’s life to reduce its impact on the environment.

A second Dott 07 project, OurNewSchool asked: how do we create schools that prepare our children for their futures? The OurNewSchool story was presented by the designers and staff members involved at the prototype school in Walker Technology College, Newcastle.

Read the transcript or listen to the audio files of the guest speakers at the Sustainability, Schools and Schooling Debate below.

Speakers

Part One

John Thackara - programme director Dott 07
Nick Devitt - senior producer Eco Design Challenge
Rachel Deller - designers into schools co-ordinator

Part Two

John Thackara
Julia Schaeper - designer OurNewSchool
Steve Gater - Headteacher of Walker Technology College
Hannah Jones - The National College of School Leadership

John Thackara - Introduction

Listen again (6.45mins, 3.09MB)

Hello and welcome to the debate on sustainability, schools and schooling. My name is John Thackara. I’m programme director of Designs of the time 07 and with several colleagues here have had the pleasure and excitement of being involved in the evolution of two Dott projects since the best part of two years now but with the major part of the activity happening this year namely “OurNewSchool” and “Eco Design Challenge”.

I’ll introduce you to some of the people as the afternoon progresses but the remarkable thing is – it’s good luck but of course good judgement that the running with these projects has coincided with two explosions really. The first explosion is the government determining to spend serious money on the rebuilding of all the secondary schools in the country over the next 10 to 12 years, the programme called “Building Schools for the Future” but that in a curious way is almost, well definitely, over shadowed by the very profound transformation to do with energy levels to do with responses to climate change.

What used to be fringe issues and the concern of scientists and a few campaigners has become seriously mainstream during the life of Dott partly to do with the Stern review, partly to do with just the accumulating evidence that we have as ordinary citizens that things cannot go on like this.

All around the festival you will see different projects that have engaged in multiple different ways with the notion of what might life in a sustainable region be like because our basic proposition in Dott is that spreading bad news and telling everybody that the world is coming to an end is not a very good motivator for action and is unlikely to make things any different. And so we’re a bottle half full biennial and looking for ways to do practical examples of changing little things in the hope that perhaps some of those little things will be models for widespread change and models that can be used by other people.

We’ve combined two projects today which is the two Dott projects on “OurNewSchool” and “Sustainability, Schools and Schooling” partly because although they start from a different point of view they both share the fact that the people who will benefit for good or ill from this work and other work like it are the students of today who are going to grow up in to the world that we all are now beginning to understand faces pretty big challenges and, as far I’m concerned, the beauty of these projects is that they have focussed overwhelmingly on giving back to the students and the communities of schools the power to take action rather than presuming to tell them what to do.

“OurNewSchool” is about how does a school take control over commissioning the rebuilding of itself rather than waiting for some experts or building consortiums to come along and tell them what to do. And certainly the Eco Design Challenge has been a pretty remarkable example of presenting a rather simple challenge and series of questions and then unleashing an extraordinary amount of energy and commitment and creativity without really doing anything very complicated to make that happen.

So the purpose of this afternoon is to review the lessons that we’ve learned in doing those two projects but very crucially to find out what we can do to make sure that these are not just one-off experiments but that they can enforce other kinds of activity in the future. This is about the “What Next?” phase. We’ve done an experiment, we’ve done a year of work, what have we learned, what can we do next?

But as I said, in this exact same period there’s been an explosion of interest in the general subject of climate change and the responses of education to that so we became aware of various friends and colleagues around the country and around the world doing not dissimilar, certainly footprinting, projects and finding ways for schools as students and as communities to measure the carbon impacts of their lives and it became almost a problem, certainly a kind of a challenge that there were so many of these projects emerging that what is the average school or school student to make of this kind of proliferation of carbon footprinting tools and projects.



I went to a conference in April, May where the government through some partners launched the Carbon Detectives Kit which is constructed on the basis that 37,000 schools will be able to measure and compare results of their carbon footprint. It seemed to me pretty obvious that we, Dott, as a small project in the north of England should at least make ourselves known to and find out how we might fit into this bigger picture, and so the third part of this afternoon is the regional launch of Carbon Detectives Kit which you’ll hear about in a moment.

I think that the kind of way that we see the future is how does a design biennial, which is what Dott is about add to this kind of proliferation of activity, and I think that the proposition that I begin this afternoon with is supposing everybody finds out how big their carbon footprint is, then what happens? How is one to make it smaller? Maybe 9 times smaller if you believe the forecast of what the experts tell us to do. How do you make the footprint of a school 9 times smaller than it is today? Answer – by some  pretty radical design actions and I think that’s maybe kind of where the two bits of today fit together. Supposing 37,000 schools start to share the results of their footprinting exercises, who is going to help them take practical real action to make those 37,000 footprints smaller? Answer – well, let’s discuss that between now and 6pm.

So we’re going to gallop through. Nobody’s going to speak for very long. We have two bits of the debate as I’ve said. Please if somebody says something starting with me but with any of the other speakers that you don’t properly understand, just shout out. We’ve fought to get away from this kind of proscenium arch structure without success so there are people standing in here under lights on plinths but we are all here as a peer group so please don’t feel any hesitation about asking for clarification.

So, that’s the way that we should run today, it’s kind of peer to peer, that’s the concept so I’d like first to introduce Nick Devitt who is the senior producer of the Eco Design Challenge to give us a summary of many hundreds of person years of work in a few minutes. Nick Devitt.

Nick Devitt, senior producer Eco Design Challenge

Listen again (14.03mins, 6.43MB)

Thanks John. I’ll just give you a quick run through of the Eco Design Challenge, where it started from, the mechanism and the results. If those of you who are here who don’t know the results and the kind of issues associated to the reasons for doing it and then maybe what we could do next.

Just to start off with, I think and I’m biased of course but I think this was one of the most important Dott projects because it was working with the youth of the North East of England, the 286 schools that we invited to take  part in the Eco Design Challenge. It could have had and may have had quite a significant affect on how some of the  Year 8 students think about their careers, what they do in the future, how their schools operate so as I said I’m biased but I think it was one of the most important projects.

As you can see it was directed at Year 8 students – that’s 12 to 13 years olds, key stage 3. We made that decision, I had a brief at the beginning which was to try and take design across curriculum. Obviously we’re using the theme of sustainability. Looking back we were very lucky with that theme because actually it wasn’t really that difficult to get the students engaged across the subject areas in sustainability.

So the questions I had for the schools was “how big is your school’s ecological and carbon footprint and how do you propose to make it smaller?” So we had to kind of come up with a mechanism for doing that. I’ll show you this slide. It’s just a quick run through of what we did before we contacted any of the schools I got a couple of guys that I know who are specialists in eco design and a practising designer to develop some fact sheets and some tasks. Activities for the student to do and this was kind of a preamble for the students so that they could get into the subject and also for the teachers to get the students into the subject. These weren’t activities that had to be done as part of the challenge, these were resources that we just wanted to make available so that people could use them. All of the resources that we did make available for the Eco Design Challenge were available to absolutely anybody. They could download them from the Dott website and that included the carbon footprinting tools that we created.

So we created the activities, we also created little tools for the students and teachers to collect information about their classrooms, about the energy being used in their schools, we created two carbon calculators. One was a fairly standard, well I say standard, it was an Excel spread sheet but it was what you’d probably expect to see in a carbon calculator, lots of little boxes to put numbers in which created the amount of carbon dioxide that was created by the school. So that was all well and good to do that but all you get out from that Excel spread sheet is a series of numbers so, numbers are great to have but you need to turn number into meaningful objects or as we decided, images.

The first stage of the challenge was for the students to get into the subject, do some activities with the teachers then from January this year we asked the students and the teachers to take the ecological and carbon footprint of their school over a 24 hour period. We made it nice and simple in relation to doing carbon footprint – it wasn’t over a month, it wasn’t over 6 months, it wasn’t over a year – just over a 24 hour period so the students had to go out with the teachers and talk to the people who would hold that information or find that information within the school so that was the first stage. And then having collected that information would establish the footprint of their school so they collected this information. Journey to and from school, energy in the classroom, energy use in the school, school meals, water use and waste disposal. So they came out with numbers from the Excel spread sheet. So we put those into pictures. From the website they’d taken the numbers from their Excel spread sheet and punched them into website just five basic numbers, punched them in and it gave them this cartoon version of the school.

This is a good school as you can see from the diagram there’s the energy creation which is coming form wind turbines, there’s not many lights on in the school so the energy usage in the school and the classroom is minimal. Not many cars in the car park, a few bikes, the rubbish is nice and well organised in bins all colour coded and the food comes on bikes in boxes and the water reservoir is full.

Not so good. These are the extremes obviously. The first one was a good one and this is the worst one you could possibly get. There are 72 literations of this cartoon version of the carbon calculator so all the schools came up with something different. The point of doing this was that this immediately became visually obvious which were the elements that they might want to work on. Which of the elements that they might pick to create a design brief or 3 or 4 design briefs if they wanted to so they did so the end of the first stage was the students came up with a brief to redesign an aspect of their school. Aspect being the key word. It could have been a service, could have been a product, it could have been a piece of communication, could have been the way the food comes to school, it oculd have been something a sub-contractor or a supplier was doing but with the aim to reduce the footprint of the school. So, with it they got the graphic and in true kind of educational fashion the got a school report as well. so it kind of gave them a written description of each element.

So what happened next? Students got to work and by god did they get to work because they had this information now. They could see it and they started to develop briefs, lots of briefs. Some of the schools were running competitions to develop briefs having found out what their footprint was so I can’t remember this student’s name but he’s down at St Hills I think, was it Anthony? Jason? Rachel and I went down to St Hills and the enthusiasm, the passion going into the design and development of the brief was something to behold. I mean we were expecting kind of kids to get into this subject. We were probably a little bit naive because these are 12, 13 year old kids and this is part of their life now. This is – all this climate change stuff is what they’re growing up with and there’s a lot of knowledge and experience within those kids – students I should say already and we were learning things off them and this is something that I’m going to come back to briefly.



Part of the Eco Design Challenge was not to try and get everybody to invent new projects. Some of it was about – there’s lots of work going on already in this area by schools and it was to try and maybe provide a mechanism for the schools to pick up a project that they were already doing and include it into the challenge. So there were some fantastic drawings, some fantastic ideas being generated.

The second stage – we selected briefs from 20 schools and we invited designers to go into schools. We had about 30 designers that went into schools eventually to help the students develop their ideas further with the teachers so here’s a designer getting some stuff out of his box to make some things and these are some of the things that they made. This is McMillan Academy down in Middlesbrough so they started to develop briefs and they started to make things and started to develop their ideas further.

Just some numbers here. 86 schools registered for the challenge. 20 schools were short listed with something like 36 briefs and we had about 30 designers. These are designers that volunteered their time to work with the schools. Rachel is just going to tell us a little bit more about what the designers actually did after this.

We estimated that from the carbon calculator, the carbon calculator, the Excel spread sheet gave us a great report on the amount of students that were getting engaged in the project for the carbon calculator, the amount of students that were working on the projects and the amount of students that were engaged in some shape, way or form within the challenge and at midway point it was 15,000 students had been engaged in this project whether it be from class assemblies, eco design days, newsletters or any other kind of activities that the teachers had come up with.



We took a, what’s been described as a light touch approach to the challenge. We provided a framework which we developed. We provided lots of resources which were completely open. No-one had to sign up to the resources or get an email address or a login or anything like that. The resources were there to be downloaded. We provided the support when it was needed so for example Acklam Grange rang up and said “this all seems very complicated to me. Can you come and explain it to us?” so we go down to Acklam Grange in Middlesbrough and talk them through the project and the idea was to try and make it as simple or as complicated as they wanted it to be so however they collected the information – they didn’t necessarily – we weren’t doing a scientific study on the carbon footprint. It was like get as much information as you can to help you develop your kind of basis for developing your design briefs and we wanted to complement the curriculum. We didn’t want to embed into the curriculum cos part of my thinking on this is, is that you should set up projects that compliment the curriculum not try and embed it into the curriculum so that any part of the teaching, teachers can pick it up and use it in their teaching and one of the biggest thing is for – to create experiential learning for students so they learn by doing not by being talked at – they learn by doing. They go out and they practically do something and they go “oh yeah, I know how that works.”

So just in case you didn’t know, this was the winner, Acklam Grange, “School of The Future”. Lord Lawson came second with “On Your Bike” and Tanfield school came third with "The Tanfield Bubble".

I’m rushing through now ‘cos Laura’s told me 1 minute to go.



So what? This is just – so what, what’s happening here? You can see from the list there that a lot of students are now doing things above and beyond and outside of what the Eco Design Challenge did. Acklam Grange obviously won and they’ve been briefing their architects and there’s a fantastic thing going on here which we’ve just called “reverse education”. It’s where the students are going out and they’re more knowledgeable and they’re going out and they’re talking to people and saying “this is what our school is like, this is the energy it consumes, this is where the food comes, this is  how much waste we generate, this is the water consumption of it” so the students are talking back to the teachers and to the local authorities with this information so that’s a fantastic thing. There’s products being developed. Eco design days are now embedded into some of the schools for next year, so they’ll be doing the footprinting next year as well. There’s no Eco Design Challenge next year as far as we’re concerned at the moment – there maybe but not at the moment.

So what’s happening next with Eco Design Challenge winners – well, luckily, well not luckily cos it’s take a lot of hard work from the Design Council to work with NESTA – National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to support the winners, so I call the 5 finalists the winners because they have all got the opportunity to secure funding to take their ideas forward and to implement them. So we’re going to run a project up until March next year to get that as far away along the road to actually implementing some of the designs as we possibly can. So we’ll be putting plans together to make that happen.

So my final slide – “what if?” – what if we did it again, but bigger. We’ve just done the North East – we could run an Eco Design Challenge – there’s so much as John touched on earlier, there’s so much resource, calculators, there’s so much information out there that could be used. We could set up a framework to run an Eco Design Challenge nationally or internationally. We had a lot of hits on the website from places like Singapore, Wales where they used the carbon calculator, where they started to use the resources that were available. So I think there’s a kind of demand out there. We could do it with more partners. A lot of what we’ve talked about is actually working with a lot more partners who were in the same sort of space doing the same sort of thing so we could do that. Maybe we could develop better resources. The resources we developed were great for what we needed but we could develop further resources. Maybe we could use more designers. Designers working with young people in schools and of course do it with more schools and I think there would be quite a significant effect on how the students grow up and how they think importantly about how design can effect the way they live, the schools that they live in and its’ an experience thing so they learn by doing so that’s the Eco Design Challenge in a nutshell.

Thank you.

John Thackara

I’ve been sitting next to these guys for the last 18 months so I have a very curios partial understanding of the project. It’s all one-sided phone calls like “you want what?” or “you want us to come to Middlesbrough, fine”.

Fantastic energy and one of the biggest sources of the positive momentum that we had was the next speaker, Rachel Deller who has been helping Nick and will tell us now about how she persuaded frankly a curious mixture of designers to go and help the schools and what happened there.

Thank you.

Rachel Deller, designers into schools co-ordinator for Eco Design Challenge

Listen again (5.52mins, 2.68MB)

Hello, so as John said, I’m technically called a designers into schools co-ordinator as far as Eco Design Challenge is concerned. That’s a nice big long name – what does it mean?

I was involved – we decided that we needed people with design experience, people with a passion and people with the knowledge and experience of using design processes to go in and help these students. Say, “right, you’ve got a fantastic idea, go with it, where can it go? What can it do?” so we, my role was to liaise between designers and schools, sort out where they’re going to go and when they can meet up and help them get a submission together for the competition.

I also got to go along and spend some time actually teaching so I got to be in the classroom as well rather than just behind a laptop which was also good fun and it helped me realise how good an experience this is for the designers as well.

All the designers we were in contact with felt really strongly obviously about sustainability. About getting better design education into schools and more opportunities for them to use design and obviously just about the fun and the opportunities that a project like this can provide, so I just want to talk about some of the designers that went in really and show you what they got up to.

This is Sebastian Conran, obviously from Conran and Partners in London and he went into Lord Lawson of Beamish school in Birtley, Gateshead and one of the best things about his visit was actually a presentation he did all about his background in design, Conran and Partners, all their products and things. The most interesting thing was how they sustainably and ethically sourced some of their materials and their labour, their workforce and their designers even from all sorts of far flung places around the world because it showed the students how design thinking can play an important part in another part of the process and not just what you see on the shelf at the end for a highly commercial company so it was showing them a different part of design which they hadn’t necessarily thought of.

This is Sarah Bray working with some of the students in George Stevenson School in Killingworth in Newcastle. She did some – she’s a recent graduate and she did some fantastic exercise to get the students expressing themselves. She said forget drawing, forget writing, that’s not important. She had them doing charades to show their design ideas and she had them making sketch models which were messy and quick because it didn’t matter that it wasn’t perfect, you know, you’re 12, it doesn’t matter that it’s not perfect and presentable so long as it communicates an idea and she felt really strongly about that and it really helped a lot with the students work.

When Nick and I went in to some of the schools, a technique we used was just getting them to record their thoughts on a big piece of paper together. Anything they said they had to scribble, they had to sketch it, they had to draw it and it didn’t have to look good. So many of them when we went in said “it’s fun but I can’t be a designer because I can’t draw” and it’s just so important that that’s, for this project especially, that’s just not the point. The point is that they could communicate their ideas quickly by scribbling and by talking and showing people what they meant.

Carol Clark is a really, really passionate engineer who works with Arup Architects in London and she went into Spennymoor School in County Durham. She was showing the students a very different aspect to design because she was showing them “right, you’ve got this idea, it’s pretty much finished, how can it work? How can it become real in your school?” which was really valuable. This is just some of the schools debating “a little bit to the left, to the right” this kind of thing.

This is Tim Bailey – the lead architect on the festival that you see outside and he worked with Ponteland School. This visit showed me a little bit of what we saw which was just a hell of a lot of fun basically. Everyone had loads of fun and everyone was learning, it sounds obvious for a school but everybody was learning. The designers were learning about how to channel and take advantage of the creativity of 12 and 13 years olds and really help them make something of it, of all these creative ideas flying at you at 50 miles an hour and the students above all learn about how design, from these designers, about how design is a big word which is applied in so many parts of a process to get somewhere really interesting and obviously sustainability was something that they all found out could be and is important throughout the process. It’s not something that you have to sort of stick in, ram in at the end with a crowbar, it’s something which needs to come from the beginning.

Just to show you a couple of examples of some continued relationships. This is one of the most exciting parts for me is that some of the continuing relationships in this  project are between designers and their schools. This is Gary Thompson who directs his own company C2M(UK) in Gateshead. He is now a governor of Dryden Special School in Gateshead and he’s still working with them to help them get their project up and running. Help spread it to other schools.

This is Michael Atkinson from Purves Ash Architects who is still helping at the Lord Lawson team get their cycling scheme and their bike storage designs ready to present to their architects who’ve just built them a fantastic new school so this is another thing that could actually really happen. It’s even more than we’d ever planned.

And finally, one of the finalists Tanfield have got this immensely complicated idea and Dr Kev Hilton, a designer who works for the Centre for Design Research and Northumbria University made regular visits and devoted a lot of time to this team and now there’s a great deal of work being done towards it being realised and they’ve got lots of relationships with very established manufacturers and all these things. This could actually happen and this is another reason why it’s so important that people with the design experience who may be have lost a little bit of their freedom and their inhibitions can work with these free and creative minds to get somewhere that’s exciting but that can actually really make a difference cos that’s the most exciting thing for these students. They’ve actually now got funding from NESTA – this could actually happen. It is the most exciting thing and I think that’s why it’s so important that designers are involved in the process.

Thank you.