Sensory Spaces: Sensory Learning – An Experimental Approach to Educating Future Designers to Design Autism Schools

Abstract

Universities and design schools have a responsibility to ensure that the education of future designers enables design for special populations, in this case specifically children with autism. This paper presents a case study of an autism defined experimental teaching-led design project, within a first-year university Interior Architecture course, on which the author is a tutor. It draws on the author’s extensive working knowledge of autism issues, incorporating mediation between SEN schools and design students, and employing research informed teaching. The project involves a new local free school for autism, at a temporary site. The experiment is designed to challenge students, emphasising the importance of understanding how primary research, accessed directly from the end users, informs progressive design thinking. It attempts to influence their design work in subsequent years at university and in practice, and facilitate bridging the gap between academic research and real-life application. This paper seeks to identify how an autism defined project, focussed on student-centred learning and encompassing choosing sessions with children with ASD, can be taught in the first year of undergraduate study. Further, it aims to analyse how the teaching styles and content of a partially ‘live’ community design project impact on the participants. This is achieved by describing the details and challenges of the project together with the interactions between the students and the school. It concludes that the project adds value to the student experience, builds student confidence and eliminates pre-conceived ideas surrounding autism. It shows that design can be an interactive process between university and special schools. Equally, the pitfalls of a live project of this nature are highlighted, as is the need for modification before similar projects are reproducible as viable educational models.

Prospects for research in architecture and urbanism

“…The journal has recently published two contributions on designing and assessing environments for autistic users (Love, 2018; Mostafa, 2018). The rising attention to this area of research is manifest in two papers published in this edition on autism as it relates to designing spatial environments for children.…”

Knowledge spaces in architecture and urbanism – a preliminary five-year chronicle

“…Arguing that to date there has been little evidence-based experimental research that examines how the environment affects this special group, the study concludes by reviewing the key lessons learned from the process of conducting the experiment. Likewise, building on her earlier work on understanding the characteristics of the environment that enable sensory experiences and sensory learning, Love (2018Love ( , 2019 assesses a teaching model she has developed and delivered over a period of 5 years, conceived as an experimental studio for first-year interior architecture university students. Her work examines the content, process, teaching style and students' feedback with a focus on transitioning between environments for people with autism in an effort to advance design of autism schools.…”

Live projects: a mixed-methods exploration of existing scholarship

“…There is also a noticeable change in the role and responsibility of educators. Several papers noted that the teacher-intensive nature of Live Projects burdened educators with considerable responsibilities (Love, 2018;Malmqvist et al, 2004;Schwartz et al, 2014).…”

“…The UK was also a notable research area for live projects, representing 11% of the publications in this study. Recent literature demonstrates a history and renewed interest in the live project model (Harriss and Widder, 2014;Harriss and Froud, 2015;Salama, 2015a;Anderson, 2017;Brown, 2016), especially in the context of contemporary challenges such as the climate crisis (Farmer, 2013(Farmer, , 2017 university-community collaborations (Love, 2018;Salama, 2015a) and pedagogy (Harriss and Froud, 2015), Publications from Australia (3%) were relatively low yet hint at a deeper tradition not represented in the metadata. Kotlarewski et al (2019) and Salama (2015b) describe over 100 live projects conducted at the School of Architecture and Design in Tasmania.…”