Children’s workshop: Dot Voting Activity
In continuation with previous efforts to include young members of the local community in the design of the urban park, this dot voting activity for children encouraged participants to pick and choose their playground/playtype of choice. The activity was prefaced with a brief discussion with the children regarding their current outdoor play activities and habits and why they choose to play at all. The children were then presented with multiple visuals belonging to categories such as nature play, sports and street playgrounds to choose from. The participants, divided into two distinct age groups, awarded a coloured sticker to every image they wished to be included in the design of the park. This simple graphic exercise effectively communicated the children’s aspirations for the play areas in the park while also giving an insight into age-based preferences for playground activities.
Adults Workshop: Progress Presentation and Discussion
Building on the input received from members of the neighborhood community from the previous co-design workshop, the Triennial invited the participants back to discuss its design proposal for the urban garden. This proposal looked to the design kit collages created previously by community members to help define programmatic functions and preferences. With input in the form of spatial organization, selection and use of locally available flora, the Triennial presented a composite scheme of the community’s requests and ideas along with the institution’s aspirations for the urban garden as a socially and environmentally sustainable public space in the neighbourhood scale. This was communicated through a physical model of the Al Manakh Spaces site along with rendered visuals of the proposal to convey size, scale, density of vegetation and spatial organization to the participants. The physical model acted as a tool to provide scale and context to discuss comments and questions from the community members regarding the proposed scheme; fragments of these conversations were also formally recorded through a survey as a chance for participants to summarize their overall reactions to the proposal.
Sharjah Architecture Triennal Website 
