This project was a collaboration between the University of Johannesburg and Growing Up Africa.
We as an Honours group were tasked to create a feature within the Devland Education Campus that was currently in construction.
Our team consisted of myself, Belinda Vorster and Sadie Marais. We aimed to design an outdoor seating feature that was a domed cage unit that housed seating for students while being covered with plants to complete the outdoor look and feel as well as drawing on biophilic design inspirations.
We started by doing research into seating designs, outdoor African architecture and plant types in order to understand all the elements to be incorporated within the final design.
We finalized on three concepts, where after we developed the structure further, refined the seating until we concluded with a scaled representation of our intended design.
Our original design was a 3 pillared structure which was developed into a 4 pillar structure due to the seating arrangement.
Our first design incorporated steel, concrete, plastic and plants all specific to the campus materials.
After input and development we removed the concrete support pillars and frame (left) while refining the seating, structural elements and the assembly (right).
This design was then presented to manufacture and design companies for manufacture input and funding opportunities in order to produce the design.
We approached both WACO Africa and Steel Studio.
In the end it was Steel Studio that chose to collaborate with us and produce the design. The design therefore underwent manufacture and material changes based on their specialty as seen in the image.
The product and technical posters encapsulate the user journey, material and assembly of the new design.
This was the intended location we plotted for the design within the campus.
The year following our Honours year, 2019, we were able to see our design be produced and constructed on the campus.
This was the final image of the fully constructed design in October 2020.
Thanks to Growing Up Africa for the opportunity to design a feature for the campus, WACO Africa and Steel Studio for the instrumental input and tremendous assistance in producing the design and lastly the workers, builders and excavators that worked tirelessly to lay the foundation and construct the final design.
Also a great thank you to Steel Studio that generously offered to cover half of the design's manufacturing costs while the remaining half was covered by Mrs. Terhune the founder of Growing Up Africa who saw the potential in our design and supported the final outcome.
