DS4SI's School Lab Youth User-Research Begins

School Lab is a design research project and an interactive installation.

It investigates ways everyday school objects, rituals and settings shape students’ experience of school. We want our youth-led research to:

• surface less explored ways of thinking about what makes school “school” for students
• function as a fresh way to speculate about school change and improvement
• support the capacity of students and youth organizers to imagine the kinds of schools they want, even as they engage in struggles to keep the schools they need

Last week we hired 8 fabulous youth interns from the Boston Public Schools to do our user-research with us. To get a sense of what we were talking about, we invited them to think about the chairs in their schools and sketch some ideas of what could make them better.  Ideas included ways chairs could be more comfortable, work better for holding backpacks, help keep students awake and even help keep students comfortable in the hot and cold temperatures of some of our old school buildings. Here are a couple examples..

Next up..sketches and observations from school hallways... Stay tuned!