Projects

The Enterprise Centre prepares students for a complex, globalised, post-industrial world.

The Enterprise Centre replaced a set of re-locatable classrooms and was an opportunity to redefine the education model at the School. It is the result of a committed effort and a highly collaborative process that brought together the strengths of students, educators, designers and planners and derived its guiding principles from a vision for learning. Collaboration between the School, the education consultant and the design team was critical in transferring pedagogy into planning. This involved several months of high-level meetings with key staff, workshops with staff and students, presentations with the School Council and Skype link-ups to develop concepts planning workshops within the design team.

Of special significance were the School workshops. These were interactive sessions with staff and students applying the CEFPI “Learning Furniture” collateral to debate, articulate and challenge the learning settings. Fifty students were involved in a workshop to review possibilities, discuss the brief and present initial concepts. The demanding workshop was followed by the students breaking into groups to prepare their learning settings and then present them to the full audience. A feature of the design process was the close collaboration with the school, the education consultant Dr Julia Atkin and the education interior designer Mary Featherston.

The result is a design based on deep education research and evolving from intense collaboration and development.

Students compiled a video exploring the uses of the building and explaining the purpose of the different learning zones:

credit: Camberwell High School