SOCIAL FURNITURE WORKSHOP
Agouza Children’s Park
Location: Ard al-Liwa
Client: The Austrian Cultural Forum
Scope: Workshops
As public spaces around Agouza were being redesigned and repurposed over the past few years, the old and deteriorated public benches in these spaces have been accumulating in the Children’s Park in Agouza. Therefore, after the success of the Along the Line project that CLUSTER designed for the park in 2022, local authorities reached out to CLUSTER to renovate these benches.
With the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Cairo, CLUSTER was able to join forces with Martin Färber from the Social Design Program in the University of Applied Arts Vienna and conduct this workshop in Ard al-Liwa to brainstorm newer, more efficient designs to be tested in the park using the old benches.
The workshop focused on the practical application of circular economy, eliminating waste and the continuous use of leftover resources found in the city. It gathered students from three universities in Cairo across the fields of architectural, interior, and product design. The students were challenged to deconstruct a typical bench from the Park and rethink design alternatives using its materials that are modular, adaptable, and repairable. Based on former research in the garden as well as individual explorations of the site, students were encouraged to consider local needs and socially relevant and site specific uses for the development of the designs.
The students collectively developed three design concepts based on their observations of the park users and tested the ideas on 1:10 physical models. Then, with assistance from the team in ALFABRIKA as well as a local craftsman they produced 1:1 models for each of the prototypes using the materials of the actual benches.