The students are designing a structure for an existing scout campsite in Morley, South West of Leeds, belonging to SLAM – South Leeds & Morley Scout District – a local scout organisation.
The project is a ‘live’ commission aimed at generating design ideas for the scout organisation to apply for funding to design and commission a structure, as SLAM currently lacks a building.
The theme of the project is waste, in its widest sense, tying in with SLAM’s aspiration for an affordable and sustainable design that can be constructed by amateurs – potentially the scouts themselves.
Having been only in the third week of the new design project, the workshop brief was to create early conceptual models. Students worked exclusively with waste and scrap materials that they brought with them or sourced from the workshop skips. The range included car tyres, wadding and textile offcuts, disassembled computer keyboards and other devices, packaging foam, chicken wire, and broken crockery.
The car tyres proved particularly challenging – difficult to cut through and unruly to combine with other materials – yet this resistance seemed to mirror the project’s broader exploration of working with constraints and found resources.
At the end of the workshop, students shared their learnings, responses to the brief, and upcoming steps in small discussion groups of three and four. One student in each group was given the responsibility of chairing the discussion.
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