Borders: Transforming Forgotten Lines

Calais is one of the closest cities in mainland France to the UK. Since the 21st century, stowaways to Britain have gathered here in large numbers and formed the Calais jungle, which has aroused the attention of the international community. All the camping tents are the refugees’ shelters, heaps of junk, smell, walking on thick mud, keep asking for food are the normalities.

The aim of this project is to design a set of refugee facilities, including an education centre and communal areas, to improve their living qualities and to learn skills before they arrive in the UK to increase the chance of getting a job. This project is done in a team of 5 including one architect, one landscape designer, and 3 project managers with different creative backgrounds.

The first 7 images show the design of the communal centre and the building renders that I have done using SketchUp and photoshop. Figure 7 was the conceptual drawing I did by sketches. In this project, the team has incorporated the use of design thinking, which helped to frame problems from the perspective of customers, as it aligns ideas and prototypes with the factors the is most important to the user-end, such as arranging an interview with a girl who was volunteered to work in Calais to understand more about Calais.

Personal Website

I created a website to show all my designs. The website includes a series of interior design renders and technical drawings. The website also contains sets of technical drawings of some interesting architectures I found or of the design I create.

I have learned the theory of the Scrum Agile approach and have had chances to apply them to different projects throughout the year. I have been taking different roles on different projects that are related to my background and used the knowledge of the agile approach. In future, I hope to work as an interior designer and use the knowledge I learned this year for project managing.