Co-Designly Practice, (CDLY P) case study 3:

Our Utopia:

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Over three weeks, Class 2 and 3 each made a monumental, table-top and classroom sized “Our Utopia” out of painted card-

board packages:

 

Firstly, they spontaneously take off their shoes and climb the table into their world. At the city centre is a large, blue, shiny Ferris wheel and colourful, isometric fairground, nestling in amongst a massive jungle where the bank is scribbled over in thick, green marker pen foliage. There’s a Lego playground with a poised balance of complex engineering; a steep, vertical slide that doubles as “a rocket launch pad (up) or airport landing strip (down)” (D., 6). Close by is “a beach with bathing, aqua mermaids holding shimmery mirrors”, “umbrella jellyfish” (S., 6), and fluently S-line fish or m-shape birds. Amidst the visual din of complex road and motorway organisation,

is a single shop with a signage logo of “No Shop” in big, shaky letters, and, what appears to be, a large window with no door. I ask

why there was only one shop that appears closed. “I don’t like being dragged around the shops by my Mummy and there are far

better things to do in our town” (J., 7). All roads lead to and from “Our School”, which is a smiley, sunshiny epicentre. “Pregnant Mum-my with her see-through baby inside”, holds a little dog on a lead and stands waving outside O.’s rendition of her home. Her mother in amongst towering, tender, and smiling flowers. At the other end of town is a tall, luminous, silvery paper mountain with tiers of “Nigerian goats” (P., 6) with a remote “Scottish Highland railway station from holiday” (A., 6) on top, linking to a snaking track down and through the base of the mountain. Across is London Zoo and “an underground cave for a caveman” in a lion cloth “who lives under the mus-eum” (D., 6). He contrasts starkly with the Stately, white ermine-trimmed red robes of the Kings and Queens and their austere castle(s) with “inside-out stables” (E., 6) and horses. The three giggling girls lay out their felt-tipped colourful beach towels under the big, smil-ing sun. C. stands on a chair ceremoniously waving a huge, transparent mylar flag over Our Utopia. J. draws “a portal to other dim-ensions”, a building or 3D door with a big “X” “swirling” in-side a spiralling circle blue-black hole of scribble. Entering his DNA physics portal, “the horse becomes a unicorn; a Utopian!”

 

At home time, the children are very reluctant to leave their sprawling, classroom-sized assemblage. Most tug their caregiver or parent into the classroom to proudly show their work. As they leave, the children extricate their buildings to take them home. Outside, I can

see L. in his duffle coat delightedly skipping home with his four buildings held close to his chest. As we clear up and waiting for his music class, D. tells me he will remake “Our Utopia” at home this weekend using his buildings, “When our cousins come to stay, me and my sisters will build one together across our bedrooms and down the hall and we can all live in it and play ALL weekend!”

 

As child-centric urban planning, Our Utopia is locus for a fidelity of phenomenologies, working together to negotiate and construct

an “inside-out, imaginary city” (D., 6) – a set, staging, and props; a “scrambled-up” (A., 6), theatrical, fantasy world “where anything;

everything is possible” (A., 5) as utopic, limitless impossibility.

 

Recurrent themes surface: questioning why things are like they are, how they could be better, ever more natural, fantastical, non phys-ical, non-corollary; another worldly idyll - “like heaven would be for us” (M., 6) or “when we’re in a lovely dream” (P., 5). A non-reality reality: the imaginary and the symbolic are, according to Lacan, anyway, inextricably intertwined and work in tension with the real. Our Utopia attempts to capture and materialise the real, phenomenological world of each child’s untethered imagination via CDLY P participation.