Why does Assembly exist?

Assembly exists to preserve and develop creative thinking in young people. Research shows 98% of five year olds test at genius level for creative thinking, but among adults it is only 2%. Assembly provides one room in Mornington where creative work can be done properly, at a scale where nothing has to be compressed.

How does Assembly work?

Assembly runs term-based courses with ten students to a class, taught by working practitioners. Each term ends in a public exhibition. Students work independently, defend their ideas, and present their work publicly.

Who teaches at Assembly?

Assembly instructors are working practitioners: photographers, illustrators, architects, painters, cinematographers. They teach what they do, bringing real-world creative practice into the studio.

What age groups does Assembly serve?

Assembly offers courses for young people aged 5 to 18, with classes grouped by age and skill level across different creative disciplines.

Creative work is a discipline. We teach it like one.

Assembly is a studio in Mornington where young people learn how to have an idea and carry it through to something finished. Ten to a class, taught by a practitioner who still makes their own work, across a full term. There are no marks, because a young person learns more from judging their own work than from waiting to be told whether it is right. At the end of term it hangs on a wall in front of an audience, which is what makes it finished.

The evidence

A 1968 study found 98% of five year olds test at genius level for creative thinking. Among adults it is 2%.

The Torrance data since 1990 shows the same decline, and the sharpest drop is in the youngest young people.

It matters more now than it did. AI can produce. It cannot originate. The thinking that happens before the prompt and after the result is the part that cannot be automated, and it is the part that takes years of practice to build.

How it works

Ten students. That is the largest a class ever gets.

A full term. Long enough to start something badly, abandon it, start again, and finish.

No marks. No rubric. No grade. Students learn to look at their own work and decide what is working, which is what every practitioner does every day and what almost nobody is taught.

Time to generate before anything gets judged, then time to refine with purpose. Those are two different kinds of thinking and they are kept apart deliberately. Most young people have only ever been asked to do the second one.

Every term ends with a public exhibition. Real walls, real audience, an opening. The work is finished because it has to be hung.

This is not enrichment. It is training.

What a young person leaves with

Across a single term, regardless of discipline:

• Idea after idea, instead of freezing on the first one
• The ability to iterate through failure without needing approval at every step
• A rough start turned into a finished result
• Decisions made independently, without waiting to be told what is right
• Their work presented to an audience, and their choices defended
• A hand in running the exhibition, not just appearing in it
• A body of work that shows where they started and how far they moved

Not a certificate. Proof.

Instructors

Assembly is taught by people who make their own work.

That is the qualification. Someone who has stood in front of a blank page, a bad first draft and an idea that didn't work, and found a way through anyway. They don't arrive with a lesson plan. They arrive with a working knowledge of how creative decisions actually get made. Tried, wrong, right, wrong again.

They won't tell a young person what to make. They will work alongside them, asking questions, offering options, showing the way through when it gets hard. Enough guidance to keep moving. Enough space to think.

David Booth

Artist

Hope Giacoppo

Product Design

Eugénie Muggleton

Director & Screenwriter

Jeremy Ley

Illustrator & Storyboard Artist

Yuko Hanoi

Japanese Language

Hiroyasu Tsuri

Artist

The studio

158 square metres at Neue Space, Mornington. Purpose built for this and nothing else. Not a room borrowed after hours.

Designed by Ben Lance. Lighting by Darkon. Acoustics by Autex. Benches built for the work rather than the price, at a height that suits standing over something for two hours.

It belongs to the students. They set it up, they use it, they pack it down. Ownership builds pride. Pride builds care. Care builds standards.