BY SAHIBA CHADHA, PARTNER

This year, like many other design courses, Open City’s widening participation programme Accelerate has had to take it’s end of year exhibition online. It’s a rather different celebration to students, parents and teachers crammed into the Bartlett foyer, but a celebration that has a great reach and will be able to live in posterity – the positive to be gleaned from the change in status quo that we are all navigating together.

As Course Tutor this year, myself and the Open City team have had to invent new ways of engaging with our 40 students to finish delivering the programme over the pandemic; such as an online Instagram challenge to design and construct a drawing machine and Zoom check in events to see how the students have been doing over lockdown. This year’s cohort have been a group of smart and vibrant young people, and we have watched their confidence develop over the programme.

We have big plans to make the course bolder and more relevant for our 2020/21 cohort including:

• A greater diversity in our collaborators: we intended to engage with a greater range of artists and built environment professionals from non-traditional backgrounds to ensure a level of representation to which the students can relate.

• Develop more meaningful workshops, to inspire students to find their own relevant interests from which we can build a body of work over the course.

• An Open Day for prospective students to understand the course and meet the Accelerate team.

• Using the course as a platform through which they can explore the city with more opportunities to discover how they can shape their own urban environment.

As post-Covid belts tighten, the programme is looking for more partners to contribute to funding so if you’d like to learn more get in touch with me at sahiba.chadha@cullinanstudio.com.

And follow the Accelerate students’ journey and work on Instagram: @opencityaccelerate