The fountain at Luckwell is the result of an 18-month project in which we’ve worked with the all the staff and students of a primary school as co-designers, co-researchers, and co-decision makers. Because everyone has had a stake in the project and it was an authentic stake, there has been a real sense of cohesion in the school around the project and now the fountain is built, there’s a massive sense of ownership – this is Luckwell’s fountain and everyone is very much looking forward to it becoming a part of their everyday lives at school.

This is no ordinary fountain however. It has a series of input sensors: pressure pads, proximity sensors and microphones and then outputs: speakers, lights and of course water jets, of which there are 7 medium sized and 1 giant, and it is completely programmable by children. It uses the Lego Mindstorms NXT programming interface which has been customised to include the spouts and lights and sensors as separate functions to incorporate into programs. The possibilities are genuinely endless.

Only time will tell what ideas the children and teachers will come up with for using the fountain. We’ve had a few ideas (getting the fountain to respond to the amount of noise in the playground, turning it into a Simple Simon game, getting it to take part in performances or using it to collect and display data – such as how happy everyone is on a given day) but we’re confident that over the coming months and years that children will come up with uses for the fountain that we, as adults would never ever imagine.

The fountain as an artefact and a tool has given us an opportunity to explore technology augmented spaces that do not use screens as outputs and keyboards as inputs and to develop a learning space – enhanced with technology – that bears no resemblance whatsoever to a classroom, but is a really fertile site for all sorts of learning.

The design process was an opportunity for us to explore the notions of learner voice, to establish mechanisms for giving children a voice, truly listening to children’s ideas and taking their input seriously. Although designing a fountain – and a programmable, intelligent one at that – is not the same as designing an entire school from scratch I still feel as though there are things we can take from the experience of Fountaineers to inform schools embarking on re-design projects.

If you want to find out more, see the fountaineers case study that is an account of the design process: www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/project_reports/Fountaineers_case_study.pdf

A second report is due out in the summer which will document the Fountain’s first few months in school and the impact it’s had on teaching, learning and the school ethos.

The original project concept was brought to Futurelab by Sean McDougall of Stakeholder Design: www.stakeholderdesign.com

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