Art & Well-being pilot project: Prototyping co-designed spaces for arts and well-being in schools

Cluj Cultural Centre launched the initiative through a participative process aiming to provide an experimental space for art and well-being in a school in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The co-design process began in November 2020 and will be followed by implementation in September 2021.

The process includes 4 phases, namely the needs assessment and prioritization phase, the selection of the intervention theme, the design of the intervention prototype, the validation of the intervention project and the implementation / arrangement, commissioning and evaluation of the intervention. In the needs assessment phase, specially designed surveys were developed and sent to students and their parents by the school teachers. Drawings, photos and written materials were also collected to outline their needs and have a clear image of the context. The phase finished after several initiatives of data collection and discussions with school representatives and members of the Steering Committee. All this research and documentation phase was of capital importance in order to inform as precisely as possible the following two phases: the selection of the intervention theme and the design of the prototype. 

More than 20 specialists and researchers in psychology, public health, landscape design and architecture, together with artists and the "Onisifor Ghibu" School representatives, are taking part in the working groups. 

The intention is to increase students and teachers' well-being and cultivate healthy social behaviours and life skills through the facilities of the new space and the cultural activities that it will host. 

The design and art-based solutions contributing to the well-being of school communities piloted within the project will serve as a model to be scaled up and replicated in other public schools in the city. 

The initiative of the space for arts and well-being is coordinated by the Cluj Cultural Centre within the interdisciplinary approach of the Art & Well-being project, co-financed by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the Learning QUB programme, financed by Fondation Botnar.

Find out more about this initiative here and about the stages of the process taken so far: needs assessment phase and design phase.