Cell Furniture
The Cell Furniture project was developed as a response to the urgent need to improve safety in UK prisons. The project generated a range of anti-vandalism and anti-suicide measures in cell furniture, some co-designed with prisoners, that also aim to increase user wellbeing, be easy to use and sustainable to produce. The project undertook a collaborative and multi-stakeholder engagement process with prison staff, prisoners and designers to innovate current cell furniture designs.
Currently, a large portion of broken cell furniture is sent to landfill because the materials are non-recyclable. The project aimed to generate sustainable cell furniture that could be manufactured within the prison.
This project recognises that redesigning cell furniture can only make a small contribution to improving wellbeing in prison: our aim to deliver one cell at a time by improving furniture is very modest. Other major issues in prisons like poor design of existing prison buildings, overcrowding, staff shortages and limited prisoner access to rehabilitation services are beyond the scope and design remit of this project.
Outputs
At HMP Standford Hill, a design cohort including prisoners, HMP staff, and DAC designers collaborated over four days to create cell furniture concepts addressing the needs of prisoners and the HMP estate. Following these co-design sessions, DAC refined the concepts into feasible proposals that are safe, comfortable, robust, cost-effective, and sustainable in both materials and manufacture.
'Make Once Make Well' describes a range of products that are intended to last a long time with minimal maintenance. The more intensive fabrication and potentially higher manufacturing cost required to make these products is justified by the products' robustness, lasting quality and lifespan. The products included the Flip Chair, the Ele Chair and metal single bed and bunk bed.
BA (Hons) Product Design students at Central Saint Martins took part in a 15-week project in 2018-2019 to generate cell furniture design concepts and prototypes. The students used a variety of resources and design-led research methods to understand the prison context and generate their design proposals. These resources and methods included the body of research gathered by DAC during the prison workshops at HMP Standford Hill, interviews with returned citizens, presentations given by HMP staff, an immersion visit to HMP Pentonville, and presentation from professional design practitioners from multi-disciplinary fields.
Impact
DACRC visualised what cell furniture is in use on the HMP estate and the ways this furniture is used, misused and abused, summarised as ‘user techniques’ and ‘perpetrator techniques’. A website (www.cellfurnituredesign.org) documents all of the project’s research, methodology and designs for public dissemination (website pending approval from funder before available in the public domain). A new range of cell furniture was developed and at the time of writing (2021) two of the designs – specifically the Flip Chair and metal bunk bed – are in ongoing stages of prototyping, testing, trials and evaluation by the Prison Service. Evaluation reports from the University of Wolverhampton and academic articles and conference papers created by the research team have been generated. Some prisoners’ experience of taking part in the project, following their release from prison, has been made into a short film.
