http://collaborative-laboratory.org/

Co.Lab, Birmingham (2026)

05/02/2024

Final day of ‘Learning from the Centre’ exhibition now over and draw a close to the exhibit curated by Dr.Mike Dring

Learning from the Centre explored the changing orientation of the Birmingham School of Architecture in its various iterations since its founding in 1908 using works from the archive. The show places the artefacts in context alongside major projects in the West Midlands and research projects from and history of live projects including work from .lab

The exhibition begins to identify common themes in the archive and offer openings to new research collaborations.

We are hoping to take the exhibit to new locations later in the year. Watch this space

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30/01/2024

Amongst all the launches of our co.lab electives, one group was luck to experience a VR experience at the Sea Life Centre, to see how to incorporate immersive media in the research of marine ecosystem and conservation. This particular VR captured the humpback whales in the Pacific.

We will be developing design concepts for an installation with Cal Poly in California, to preserve natural marine habitats that have formed on a decommisioned oil rig in the Pacific.
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29/01/2024

All the electives have now started. Always exciting to see them all being kicked off around the school of architecture. We’ll keep posting updates on projects as they come.
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26/01/2024

23-24 project: Telling Tales
Collaboration with: Shropshire Museum Trust

In 2018 an amateur metal detectorist made an incredible find in a boggy field in Shropshire. An extraordinarily rare and well-preserved gold sun pendant, (bulla), it was thought to be Roman, however, the pendant was dated as over 3000 years old. As a valuable bronze age find, the pendant reveals new knowledge about the Bronze Age, and has the potential to inspire the discovery of another 3000 years of stories.

This Co.LAB will focus on conceptual ideas that take these stories as design drivers to develop museum experiences and structures to display artefacts in a way to retell the stories to a public audience.

This elective develops theoretical ideas and strategies of curatorial practice and understand how this is applied in a museum context and put these into practice through the development of a design for exhibition and curating.
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25/01/2024

23-24 project: Ocean Sight One
Collaboration with LAES, CalPoly State University

Ocean Sight One is a diverse team of teachers, researchers, artists, and developers who have come together at Cal Poly (SLO) to document and present to the California public the ocean ecologies that have developed at the base of the oil rigs off the coast of Santa Barbara. We are working to initiate community dialogues about how the rig decommissioning process will interact with the marine life below.

Phase 1 began in early 2023 with a series of interdisciplinary design workshops and visualizing underwater 360 video footage from a dive down a rig into the artificial reef life at the base. Phase 2 (which you will be part of) will be design of an exhibition structure as an educational walk-through and virtual reality experience for the Ocean Sight One project. The final professional concept for the interactive entrance-way will be an interactive, traveling immersive and virtual reality experience, designed to educate visitors of all ages, cultures, and educational levels about hidden ocean ecologies and their connection to oil industry structures off the coast of California. The immersive design and civic education solutions for this collaboration can also inform other communities around the world that will soon be dealing with the same issues from the North Sea, to the Gulf of Mexico, Southeast Asia, Western Africa, the Caspian Sea, and the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

This project has been developed with a unique collaboration between BCU and Cal Poly in California. We will be working together with mechanical and manufacturing engineering students in the CEBE faculty, and sharing our process in parallel with LAES (liberal arts & engineering studies) students back in California who will also be running the design project.
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24/01/2024

23-24 project: reimagining Dudley High Street
Collaboration with:

CoLab Dudley invites local people to co-create, take action and learn through practical, hands-on projects and experimentation. They convene a collective of local creatives, designers, researchers and doers around seasonally rooted work. Together they seek to grow collective imagination capacities and support local people to think longer term and take action towards the futures they want. They are based on Dudley High Street, where they have undertaken creative experiments over the last 6 years and have accumulated learning and research on perceptions of the High Street across that time.

In close collaboration with CoLab Dudley, this Co.LAB embarks on a journey of regenerative design and urban agriculture to deeply explore Dudley High Street from diverse angles, cultivating a holistic understanding of its residents and environment. Leveraging design research, mapping, and analysis, our primary objective is to uncover the physical and social characteristics of Dudley High Street and its ever-evolving landscape at various scales.

Subsequently, we start actively engaging in participatory processes to pinpoint potential areas for urban agriculture and community gardens in the vicinity of the high street. This endeavour involves both desktop mapping and on-site investigations. Furthermore, we will develop innovative strategies for cultivating and propagating plants in conjunction with potential locations around High Street, with a particular emphasis on sustainable water recycling and preservation practices.

Students will explore novel approaches to both physical and social infrastructure, thus contributing to the gradual establishment of a sustainable, community-led revitalization of the high street.
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23/01/2024

23-24 Project: Gramer Haor
Collaboration with: Shahjalal Technical University, Gaon Workshop.

The agendas for sustainability have generally focused on cities, due to rapid population and land expansion growth, and cities are perceived as the future of humankind. However, “there is an urgent need to recognize that smart and sustainable solutions are even more important for rural communities, that are often far away from the growth poles of urban based industrial development, and disadvantaged in their access to education and health” (Fennell et al, 2018).

Haor is a unique seasonal wetland ecosystem in the North East area of Bangladesh. Due to climate change, seasonal flooding, economic influence and population growth, the lives of local people have gradually separated from the connection to the environment, especially water.

The Gramer Haor collaboration addresses the Declaration on Sustainable Urbanisation, encouraging the sharing of knowledge and experiences gained, including but not limited to Commonwealth dialogue; twinning of cities, and increased opportunities for professional training in urban development, including town planning.

Our aim – Public space small intervention proposal:
The next stage of Co.Lab studio will develop proposals that support, advance and adapt building traditions within the village and the surrounding areas. Students will explore small interventions that benefit the villagers, that generate income revenues, provide access to green energy, access to clean water, create opportunities for education and address the health and wellbeing of the villagers.
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21/01/2024

23-24 Project: Neighbourhood as a unit of Change
Collaboration with:

“It could be that the neighbourhood, not the individual, is the essential unit of social change. If you’re trying to improve lives, maybe you have to think about changing many elements of a single neighbourhood, in a systematic way, at a steady pace.”
―David Brooks

CIVIC SQUARE is an ambitious community led organisation and think-tank that is aiming to not just re-think community space in the city—they are aiming to enact change now. This blurb, taken from their website helps contextualise why to them the neighbourhood isn’t just a unit of community, it is the ideal unit to affect immediate change in our cities and infrastructure (both physical and social):

The local neighbourhood, and neighbourhoods that many of us grew up in, live in, and are proximate to our everyday experience make the change and work we are all fighting for deeper and connected to our collective purpose. In some ways the neighbourhood is the right size for communities to mobilise effectively, and connected enough for the broader implementation of policies that can be significant enough and spread.

This CO.LAB will be building upon two years of research & design thinking done as a collaboration between BCU students, CIVIC SQUARE and residents of Link Road in Ladywood and wider communities in Birmingham to think about how retrofit can be re-imagined. Working with ‘street governance entities’, students will work as co-designers and strategisers developing the residents’ proposals for the change they wish to see. From detailed design resolution of specific elements, to street scale logistics, to larger strategic thinking, the Co.Lab may touch on all layers of the process – it all depends on the aims, goals and aspirations set by the community and by you!

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20/01/2024

23-24 Project: imagineering Supercycle Highways
Collaboration with: Canal and Rivers Trust, Active Wellbeing Society

The Supercycle Highways CoLAB elective investigates the feasibility of redesigning the main distributor routes of Birmingham’s Canal Navigation between BCU, City Campus and access to Perry Barr, and Alexander Stadium. At the heart of the design brief is the aspiration to cast aside conventions and through the power of conceptualisation bold brave new vision that creates an attractive, safe and enjoyable experience for non-vehicular traffic across all ages and seeks a solution using a prototype design that provides a new way of engaging with Birmingham’s Industrial Hinterland.
Idea for this may include:
· - research best practice in green infrastructure, sponge city thinking and biodiversity.
· - The focus is on pioneering design ideas that showcase innovation in urban cycling environments
· - Ideas to enhance biodiversity
· - Investigation into safety, perceptions , prejudices and removal of barriers that exclude broad users groups.
· - Put in place designed based strategies that could act as a catalyst in reshaping Birmingham’s perception as a place to cycle and aid inclusiveness across generations and communities.
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19/01/2024

23-24 Project: Asante Cocoa Farmers
Collaboration with: Three Mountains Cocoa, Kwame Nkrumah University

In the case of the Cocoa Farmers of Asante, Ghana, we will be collaborating with the Three Mountains Cocoa, a local farming enterprise and the architecture students from Kwame Nkrumah University of Technology (KNUST) with a view to explore the development of design proposals based on locally sourced materials. Such proposals will address some of the needs of the local community. The ultimate objective of this project is to work with local communities and other local stakeholders in the global South to help them develop sustainable solutions to their living conditions. These can cover a wide range of built and natural environment related aspects.
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18/01/2024

23-24 Project: Catermaran
Collaboration: ITTransport Ltd. And Calima Botes

Colombia, like many developing nations is a mixture of developed and undeveloped. Some areas are prosperous, and some large areas have been marginalized. This project is one that focuses on designing a product that addresses the social need for vessels used for work (fishing, transport of people and goods etc) that will operate in the coastal areas or rivers (or both) of that vast country.

This Co-Lab elective will be about designing boats that consider the use of appropriate technologies for construction and aim to offer solutions that are sustainable and do not rely on polluting means of propulsion. The project will require investigation into the local needs of the users and identify possible solutions in the form of a multihulled boat.

The project will undertake some technical development, and scale modelmaking to design and develop suitable solutions; this will be a very hands-on project, that will require making as the main driver for the design process. The aim is to produce designs that are elegant in a functional sense, that combine an understanding of how things will need to be made with how they will be used.
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17/01/2024

23-24 Project: Growing Garden
Collaboration: The School of Fashion and Textiles

here in Parkside, we are using the third-floor courtyard to grow a number of species of plants and flowers for various sustainable and circular uses including bio-based dyes and leathers. There is an ambition to increase production of the garden for the department and its students. To create a happy and artistic place for all users, this project aims to design a live and dynamic place with an eye-catching structure using innovative bio-based materials and colours/finishes that would represent the principles of the growth garden.

The design process will ask students to consider theories that inform design practice. So, we will discuss the idea of the ‘third place’ - how it is responsible to address a robust ‘social interaction’ in such informal public spaces. Ray Oldenburg who is an urban sociologist, advocates the importance of informal public gathering places. In his book The Great Good Place (1991), Oldenburg discusses ‘how’ and ‘why’ these places are essential to society and public life, discussing bars, café, general stores, and community vitality.

This learnt theory will be applied to construct a full scale prototype of the garden structures and evaluate their functions in the space with modular construction systems.
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Co.Lab

05/02/2024

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