We were approached by the organizers of Stockwell Festival to create an installation for their annual community festival. We decided to collaborate with UCL Engineering Outreach, collaborating with school children from ELUTEC to design and build the exhibition. We went from brief to finished installation in four days, and most importantly had a lot of fun doing it!

This installation was part of 'If These Wall's Could Talk', a larger rolling project that will culminate in a series of events in November 2017. This was the first of a series of workshops we're running with various schools and community groups.
 

The students from ELUTEC conceived a wall with triangular modules. The stairs allow the wall to be climbed, inspired by the idea that inhabiting wall space can bring people together. Onlookers were encouraged to interact by writing a response to the question 'What do you think life is?'

ELUTEC students painted a beautiful tree of life on one facade of the wall. As a collective we're interested in the Interesection of Art, Architecture and Engineering. The young people epitmoised this ethos, combining there natural talents to build and design a stunning installation within four days.

For UCL it's important to be able to engage the public in projects. By creating an exhibition around the installation our hope was to raise awareness around not only our projects, but establish a community focus with UCL Engineering Outreach.

This Design Challenge encompasses aspects of Urban Design by combining the social/artistic significance of Walls in the built environment with the practical engineering task of building a prototypal wall as a freestanding structure. 

We began the day with a short presentation before moving into a group brainstorming session.

Initial sketches. Each member of the team sketched out early concepts. They are encouraged to be creative and artistic, the next step was to review for engineering feasability and check if designs met requirements.  

After an initial brainstorm participants present ideas for feedback from the group.

We had a group discussion around all 8 of the students individual designs. We worked together to consolidate all of the key features into one wall

For designers, seeing sketches come to life in physical form is deeply satisfying. It was in important part of the workshop to construct the wall alongside the students.

Students took orginal artwork and scaled it up for live exhibition.

Abinasha Kalsi, UCL Alumnus and Graduate engineer at TFL discusses designs with students, and gives an insight into professional opportunities in engineering.