Utilizing Participatory Design to Develop a Contextual Based Toolkit for Enhancing Educational Spaces for Tea Estate Communities Part 2 Dissertation 2026 Ragu Gallearachchi City School of Architecture | Sri Lanka This dissertation asks how educational spaces in Sri Lanka’s tea-estate communities might be designed with the people who use them, rather than for them. Although new school infrastructure continues to be delivered across the estates, many decisions are still shaped through top-down processes that miss the everyday knowledge of students, teachers, parents and community leaders.The research focuses on Hatton-Dickoya, a region shaped by histories of plantation labour, cultural marginalisation and unequal access to public resources. Drawing on fieldwork, participatory design theory, Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation and selected international precedents, the project explores how communities can move beyond consultation into shared authorship.Its main outcome is a modified participatory design toolkit, adapted from the Enterprise Participatory Design Toolkit for rural, multilingual and socially unequal contexts. Methods such as community mapping, site walks, interactive model-making, group conversations and visual prompts were tested to address barriers of language, literacy, confidence and institutional power.The dissertation argues that participation is not only a social process, but a spatial one: it can change what is noticed, whose knowledge is valued, and how design decisions are made. By offering a practical, context-specific toolkit for tea-estate schools, the project contributes a replicable model for architects, educators and development practitioners working toward more equitable, culturally grounded and community-led learning environments. Tutor(s) Rashika Abeyawardana Chiranthi Warusawitharana