The Flipshop

A versatile workshop to create & collaborate

product design in collaboration with Sander Bentvelsen, Julie Daniels, Noor Richter & Mauritz von Kardorff

This design project is the result of the first-year master's course „Bucky Lab“ at TU Delft. In 2023, a project brief was developed in collaboration with the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) to help design therapeutic outside spaces for unaccompanied refugee minors (UAMs) within larger reception centers in the Netherlands. For the design, a partnership with the non-profit organization „Office for the New Earth“ (ONE) was formed, where they provided a design for an overall pavilion structure in which the students are expected to design infill facilitating activities.

We started off this task by getting to know some of our clients. Since the UAMs are
typically male and between 14 and 18 years old. We met a group of teenage boys
living together in a small reception center with little space for recreation. This
circumstance leads the boys to mostly hang around in the city center outside of the
camp. Here, we saw the opportunity to give them a place to learn a new
skill, be creative, and experience self-efficacy.

The provided pavilion structure consisted of timber plywood trusses arrayed
modularly with 1,20m spacing. We filled the space between the frames with our
design idea, a workshop that brings you together and enables you to repair things,
from your bike to furniture or your clothes. It comes to life when needed and is
seamlessly tucked away after you're done. This is what makes up our Flipshop!

To design it as practically as possible, we sketched it 1:1 on the wall. This method helped us understand the real-life experience when sizing and arranging storage and functionalities.

Our Flipshop is designed to be assembled out of CNC-milled 18mm plywood pieces
that are stuck together using only friction-fit connections. The assembled workshop shelf unit can be attached to the timber framing with screws, allowing for some flexibility due to built-in tolerance. The Flipshop can be upgraded and extended by a storage shelf unit in the next timber frame module. Finally, we closed the pavilion off to the side with a polycarbonate facade element that can be fixed or flipped up.

After our final presentation to our instructors, ONE and COA, the agency selected our design and two others to be included in the pavilion‘s first application at a facility in The Hague. We were offered to help by finalizing the design planning and building. In the end, the flipshop was realized by Sander Bentvelsen and me as part of a summer internship at ONE. All parts of the flipshop were cut by CNC and then manually prepared for assembly on site. Additionally, we were tasked with designing and building large, sturdy, foldable tables to display in front of the flipshop.
View the whole project here: https://new-earth.one/pavilion-leidschendam/

Academic work, 2024
As part of the course AR1B011 Bucky Lab
Supervised by Dr.-Ing. Marcel Bilow & Ir. Nadia Remmerswal
Delft University of Technology