Second Intervention: Speculative users, discomfort, and collective recalibration
The second intervention took place once students had completed an initial phase of site, building, and demographic research and were asked, as we do every year, to create three speculative users for their design proposals. The studio brief is to work on the retrofit of the Dorset Estate, with the aim of improving living conditions and wellbeing while also increasing density and the number of dwellings.
Despite this research phase, the first iteration of speculative users followed a familiar pattern. Characters were generally well intentioned, but often unrealistic. Many students focused on lifestyle descriptions while overlooking fundamental constraints such as income, tenure, or eligibility for social and affordable housing. At this stage, students were largely confident that their users were appropriate.
This moment of confidence was precisely what the second intervention set out to work with.
Designing the intervention (more info on this post)
Rather than correcting the speculative users directly, I wanted to create a situation in which students would begin to question their own assumptions collectively. The intervention was therefore structured as a staged in-studio workshop rather than a tutor-led critique.
Students were first asked to work in pairs and introduce their speculative users to one another. My teaching partner and I moved around the room listening to the conversations, but deliberately did not intervene. The aim was to observe how students described their users, what they prioritised, and which questions emerged organically through peer discussion.
Following this, students pinned up their work and presented their users to the whole group. I then facilitated a collective discussion using a set of pre-planned questions, while my teaching partner took notes. Students were informed that this activity formed part of my Action Research Project and agreed to take part.
Introducing constraint through questioning
The discussion began with a simple question: do you think you have accurately portrayed the type of user who would reasonably live in social or affordable housing? At this stage, all students responded confidently and affirmatively.
The conversation then shifted to household income and working patterns. Many students had not explicitly considered this, so we asked them to estimate income levels during the session. While some figures remained unrealistic, they were noticeably closer to real conditions than those produced by previous cohorts. Importantly, the act of having to articulate income publicly introduced a moment of productive discomfort that prompted further questioning.
As the discussion continued, issues of tenure, household composition, and longer-term precarity began to surface.
At the end of the session, the initial question was revisited. This time, students collectively acknowledged that their first approach had been limited. They recognised that they had underestimated the constraints faced by the users they were designing for and articulated a clearer awareness of how these constraints should shape their design thinking.