Introduction:

The purpose of the study was to find out the needs of a future school, as perceived by the pupils in participative planning workshops. Another aim of the study wasto predict changes in spatial arrangement of future schools. The data produced in the workshops will be used in the Opinmäki school planning competition in Espoo.

Theoretical Background

Who gets to influence the reform of the built environment? Reciprocal and participative planning allows individuals and groups to participate in the different phases of the planning process. The idea behind the study is that the inhabitants and users should always have an influence in the planning - hence the pupils were given a chance to show their input to the plans of their school. The users of this project were the pupils, who got to participate in brainstorming and designing the future school. The pupils of Arkki are used as the representative group in the project.

Research Methods and Data

The research method was workshops for planning the spaces and their arrangements for various school functions, yards and the wholeness composed of these. Interviews of the pupils, completed plans, and the notes made by tutors in the workshop were collected. The material was documented in video and photo format and discussed with the pupils. Two groups, each consisting of 12 pupils, participated in the project during the autumn semester of 2007. The weekly workshops were three hours long: The tutor would initiate the workshop by inspirational pictures and theses, the pupils would draw sketches which would then be discussed and analyzed by both pupils and tutors. A part of my master's thesis is the report consisting of the results given by the analysis. The ideas and the models derived from them will be used in planning the Opinmäki competition entry.

Results

The results were fascinating and the ideas were modern and innovative. The pupils were serious and evolving in skill and creativity, which can be seen in the increasing quality of their plans during the period. In the end of the workshops, the plans and sketches were scanned and individually analyzed in the empiric part of the master's thesis. Certain planning models and new building types /-styles stood out in the workshop results. These I reprocessed and analyzed in the beginning of the year. The master's thesis is now finished and includes five typologies of a school building, which enforce the prominent themes of future school.

Conclusion

The idea was to give the pupils a chance to participate in the planning of their own work environment. Most of the pupil's day is spent in school, so they are well accustomed to their school environment and they have a great deal of ideas about how to improve it. The documentation and analysis of these ideas opens for us a pupil's view on the future school, it's goals and ideas. I perceived similar prominent themes in other researches of the future school. These universal themes, concretized in the workshops as building types, add intrigue to the results of this research.