Sam Baum writes about the design workshops

Over the past 3 weeks, I co-ran a series of workshops along with The Building Exploratory which investigated physical aspects of the buildings and surroundings of Bow Road. 

Working with year 10 students from Langdon Park school, I covered the concept of marketing and how we (as a team of young marketeers) can influence people. We then brainstormed positive words we could work with to sell Bow Road to the greater public.  I then showed them to 2 fashionable trends within the graphic design work, Pixel Graphics, covering artists like Eboy and Chuck Close and Typography, covering artists like Eine and Bob & Roberta Smith. 

Working with this new awareness we then visited Bow road itself and noted down 1 of 2 things: 1, all the typefaces we could see around the street, from road signs to shop signs and graffiti to billboards. 2, the exact layouts of the windows, noting down the sizes and spacing between panes in order to make a pixel grid canvas to work from.  By the end of session one we had numerous sketches of the type and windows of Bow Road.

I found that once the students eyes were open to the potential for design, that they suddenly became aware of the numbers of typefaces and window layouts around them. Something that before the session they would have overlooked but afterwards were fully conscious of.

In our second session we then worked with our findings and created one of two things. The first was a typographic pin and thread image and the second was a pixel - window picture. In both cases the students worked with words that they felt conveyed the positive aspects of Bow Road, such as Nature, Beauty, Multi, Historical, Tree and Unity. 

The students who worked in the typographic method wrote out their words, traced the corners and edges of their letters with pins and then weaved and wound different colours of thread around the pins to highlight their words.

The students who chose the pixel window route carefully drew out their grids of windows and then using collage, created colourful imagery and words with each window pane in their grid representing a single pixel.

This was really interesting to see in action, as both routes were technically and conceptually testing, but over the session, the students hard work began to pay off as 3D thread and pixel based representations of their ideas began to form. And the prospect of some of the work actually being show on a large scale on Bow Road was an exiting prospect for some students too.