Since the COVID-19 pandemic a large portion of students are absent in classrooms every day. These students are missing the academics, socialization, and real world lessons that regularly attending school provides. An important component of students’ return to consistently attending class is the strengthening of their connection to their school space. With students as design partners, this project explores how the designed objects and spaces that surround students can support a reconnection to the school environment.

Current research indicates that the built environment of educational spaces has a deep influence on engagement, social interactions, and effective learning. Children spend a large portion of their daily life at school, yet rarely have an influence on how the space is designed. Sometimes they participate as testers of a space or product, or they are briefly observed and interviewed, yet design remains almost completely controlled by adults. As the design industry continues to deepen the involvement of user groups in the design process, how can we involve children in the development of their educational spaces?

We assembled a team of four adults and nine children, ages 10 to 12, who attend New York City public schools. Together, we conducted five collaborative design sessions to research, ideate, and develop design improvements for the school environment that encourage students’ feelings of engagement and belonging in school. The team explored children’s feelings around belonging, the spaces, activities, and times in the school day that fostered and depleted belonging, as well as changes that would increase their sense of belonging.

This project utilized the cooperative inquiry methodology, making children equal partners in the design process through a long-term design relationship and a breaking down of the power dynamics between adults and children. By working with students as experts in their own education, we designed together to improve their experiences, with their points of view at the forefront.

Our findings suggest that school spaces that promote belonging and engagement need to:
(1) foster a spectrum of activities -- providing moments to be calm, moments to be active, opportunities to socialize, and space to be alone,
(2) provide students the freedom and flexibility to move between these activities as they see necessary,
(3) foster a sense of customization and personal ownership within the school, and
(4) allow students to feel “together but different”, celebrating individual differences while feeling accepted in the school community.

After iterative development with the students and adult stakeholders, the project resulted in three design concepts:
(1) a redesign of a typical classroom chair,
(2) a modular furniture system that creates opportunities to be alone, sit with friends, move, and stretch, and
(3) a floating partition system for division of classroom space for engagement or privacy.

Although our participants, findings, and design solutions were focused in New York City, current education reporting notes that issues of absenteeism and disconnection are widespread. Our work demonstrates how educational pedagogy is further supported through an environment that is carefully designed alongside the learners who use it, and presenting our research as an oral presentation at ICERI 2025 will allow us to share our findings with the larger education, research, and design communities.

Keywords: Co-design, participatory design, design research, community engagement, belonging, engagement, school design, educational design.