First Intervention – “What Is the Meaning of Home for You?”
This first intervention sits at the very beginning of the studio and responds to a question I have been asking students for several years: What does home mean to you? Until last year, the way we approached this question was by asking students to draw their own homes. Over time, this exercise proved extremely effective in helping students understand domestic scale, spatial organisation, and how things are built. Because the object of study was so close to them, students developed a strong awareness of measure and materiality almost instinctively.
After running the same brief for several years, however, I also became more aware of the broader implications of this exercise. When students drew their own homes, social and economic inequalities became immediately visible. Some students presented generous one-bedroom flats in areas such as King’s Cross or Battersea, often lived in alone, while others revealed overcrowded family homes with limited privacy and shared spaces. Although these drawings were powerful, they also exposed personal circumstances in ways that were not always easy to hold within the studio, particularly at the very start of the course.
As part of this Action Research Project, and informed by ethical guidance on emotionally demanding research — which highlights the need to minimise unintended exposure and distress in educational settings (BERA, 2024) — I decided to reframe this initial exercise. Rather than asking students to draw their homes, I invited them to respond to the question “What is the meaning of home for you?” in an open format of their choosing. This marked the first intervention of the ARP.
Different ways to reflect
Shifting the format, not the intention
The intention of the exercise remained the same: to encourage reflection on domesticity, everyday life, and lived experience. What changed was the mode of response. Students were free to choose how they wanted to express their understanding of home, without being required to produce a spatial drawing of their own living conditions.
The outcomes were deliberately diverse. Some students worked with collage, layering images and text to express ideas of belonging, memory, or displacement. Others used photography to capture everyday moments or objects associated with domestic routines. One student responded through a short video clip by an artist, using it as a way to articulate emotional and spatial aspects of home that would have been difficult to draw.
These responses were reflective, but in a way that felt less exposing than drawing plans of personal homes. Inequality did not disappear, but it was no longer immediately legible through square metres, room sizes, or location. Instead, discussions emerged around care, comfort, routine, safety, and relationships — themes that could later be connected more explicitly to housing, users, and wellbeing within the studio sequence.