Deer Park Alpha

Portsmouth, UK: We have been working with Admiral Lord Nelson School on a project through the Creative Partnerships programme.

A group Year 9 students spent the summer term 2009 exploring their school and city through a series of lessons that asked them to consider how the school and city worked and did not work. Using mapping, design, drawings and collage students looked at the landmarks, neighbourhoods and routes that make up the whole of Portsmouth. They then looked the school itself: Where is the edge of the school grounds?

Through looking at the school students highlighted two key areas that did not work very well and required some design work: The toilets and the hot classrooms. The ideas produced during these two design exercises are represented on this poster.

Deer Park Alpha is a design, architecture, communciation and innovation firm specialising in translating complex and vast subject areas into engaging and useful formats to enable people to be better informed citizens. We work with private companies, local authorities and public sector organisations to help them demystify what they do to their clients, customers and employees.

An example of this is our recent guidebook to urban design called ‘Where We Live’ which took the enormous subject of urban design and what makes good urban environments and made it accessible to all.

As a team of architects, artists, designers and faciliators, Deer Park Alpha focuses effort into areas that loosely fit within the Built Environment subject area.