From 10 to 21 June 2024, the 2nd year students of the Interior Design track at the Design Department of the Art Academy of Latvia (LMA) participated in a two-week long summer workshop called Street as Interior. Organised by LMA and led by designers Charly Blödel and Edgars Jane from the Netherlands. The workshop continued the 2023 iteration of the workshop Making Space as Volume 2. The aim of the workshop was to explore the role of the street as a democratic public space for well-being. The site of the research was the Children's Clinical University Hospital complex in Riga, which is interwoven by a wide set of streets that provide a number of functions appropriate to a hospital. Starting with patients moving around the area from one appointment to another, patients walking to breathe fresh air, visiting friends or family, hospital staff taking a lunch break in the fresh air, etc.

The core questions, to which the students seeked answers during the workshop, were: “What does it take to change the value of a space? How can a network of connecting streets and pedestrian routes contribute to patient recovery or staff relaxation? How can we bring wellbeing into the streets?"

The students developed six different speculative design scenarios based on personal observations from the initial site visit. In the first phase of the workshop, students mapped the streets of the hospital complex and the different roles that this public space plays in the daily life of the hospital. In the second phase, students developed design proposals for the street as an interior.

By developing speculative design scenarios, students 'integrated' themselves into their own proposed scenarios to test and illustrate the potential of the street as a catalyst for social well-being.

The examples developed during the summer internship were presented in the form of maps, collages and physical scale models to the representatives of the Children's Clinical University Hospital.

You can find the developed proposals here. 

The workshop was organised by: Art Academy of Latvia, Design Department staff: Ingūna Elere, Ieva Lāce-Lukševica, Evija Štelpa, Charly Blödel, Edgars Jane.