Wild Co-Design

Artist and researcher Aron Weber, alongside a group of creative practitioners, worked with children from Alexander McLeod Primary School and Abbey Wood Nursery School to co-design an outdoor studio and planting scheme. Co-production was the central theme: rather than delivering a finished design to the children, the project made them its authors. Week over week, they developed and refined their ideas through performances, short films and zines, learning from practicing artists and place-makers while building a genuine stake in the outcome. The project aimed to immerse children not only in contemporary art and making practices, but to make them the curators and creators of the outdoor studio and sensory garden.

Aanchal Saxena introduced the children to Transentience, a practice of empathetic role-play connecting with urban nature amid climate and ecological crises, which she developed during her MA at the Bartlett School of Architecture. The children imagined the garden from the perspective of its non-human inhabitants: plants, animals and insects. A wishing tree, constructed from the viewpoint of the bugs and animals living in the garden, engaged them with the circular material culture and biodiversity of the space, while feeding directly into the final design.

The children visited the Unravel textile exhibition at the Barbican ahead of their workshop with Wei-Ting Ma. They explored domestic practices of care and low-cost, low-carbon interventions in public space, and reflected on the relationship between textiles and communities. This connection would later reappear as a central element in the design of the garden, echoed in the cyanotype lounge chairs and curtains.

Wei-Ting Ma led stop-motion filmmaking workshops following the Barbican visit. The films imagined the garden as a fertile ground for exploration and play, reconstructing it as a theatre of life and providing a blueprint for the final shape of the project. Exploring alternative interventions into the space, the children were engaged in thinking through making, echoing practice-led research methods in architectural planning.

Peas Press brought their experience from teaching printmaking at the MA Design Expanded Practice course at Goldsmiths to run workshops on zine-making and LEGO printing. They delivered a talk on the history of zines and pamphlets, teaching children about the importance of circulating written ephemera and its roots in community-centred practice. The children made their own zines about topics important to them, which now live in the garden as an archive of the people involved. The LEGO printing workshop taught traditional, low-cost printing techniques, and the prints produced became the basis for the cyanotype fabrics used in the final installation.

Maxi Himpe used performance and spatial exercises to help children reflect on their positionality within the garden. The activities relied on imagination to reshape and reconstruct the space, inviting the children to consider how the project was not only physically remaking the garden but reconfiguring how they related to it and what they used it for. Using the workshop to fuel their ability to imagine new futures, the children became the designers of the plan for the garden, gaining the ability to imagine new ways of being together with nature.

Jessy Solomon shared her practice of biomaterial production and locally sourced ceramic making. The children created ceramic figures that now watch over and care for the garden, made from clay sourced partly from the garden itself and mixed with clay from various ecological sites around London. The process taught the children about material processes, circular materials and low-carbon practice, while highlighting the intrinsic creative potential already present in the space.

In preparation for the reopening of the garden, the children visited the Enzo Mari exhibition at the Design Museum, where they learned about design for play and interaction. Getting ready to finish reconstructing the garden, they explored the complex practices of curating and presenting objects made to be used, which situated their own involvement in the project as co-producers and co-curators.

The project culminated in cyanotype-printed deckchairs and pavilion curtains, a direct response to the children's own request for more space to sit and rest, and a living archive of everyone involved. Zines made during the workshops now live in the garden. Ceramic figures watch over the space. Every element was designed to be easily repairable, building in the expectation of ongoing care rather than a fixed endpoint. The aim throughout was that children would leave not just having made something, but feeling that the garden was genuinely theirs.