Design workshop with client (Malvern Outdoor Elements)

On the 26th January, a meeting was arranged with the client, Nick Hands from Malvern Hills and the director, Simon. This meeting was arranged so that we could create a design workshop with the client to find out what he wants to achieve with the final sketch scheme outcome for the term. The meeting was organised by ourselves with an agenda of different tasks for the client to complete. As a group of five, we decided to start the meeting with a questionnaire, which acted as an ice breaking activity, by asking the client a few questions on the history of Malvern. It was apparent that both Simon the director of Malvern and Nick, the client, knew a lot about the history of Malvern, this was an element that later inspired our design outcome, relating the building to the context of Malvern. The questionnaire is shown below:

This activity was then followed up with a spot the difference game, which again, challenged Nick and Simon’s familiarity with the site.

We then proceeded with the main body of the meeting, which was a presentation we created, which had carefully selected relatable images side by side, which the client and his partner would select the image they preferred and write down the name on a sheet. We based the images chosen on the following themes: materiality, texture, light, colour and precedents. With these images, the client was given 5 seconds to quickly choose which image they liked, this short timing forced the client to choose images based on their natural instinct by giving them limited time to change their mind. Below is an example of the ‘pick an image’ activity.

In order to keep the client alert, we added in placebos, that had no relevance to the activity but made the game fun and spontaneous. An example of the placebo sides are as shown below.

From this presentation we collated the images which they had both selected onto a mood-board, before preceding with term 2 design concepts. The activity we chose was an informative way of finding out what the client wanted from the building without taking a formal approach. By creating different activities, we engaged Nick and Simon in to the creative process at an early stage, which helped us to develop a concept based on the information collected from the design workshop. The mood-board is shown below.

Latticia Morapedi