As we continue to shape our places, we are faced with the huge challenge of balancing our personal needs, the collective needs of our communities and those of our increasingly fragile planet.
Join us for People, Place, Planet: The Debate, a free online debate open to all audiences, which aims to create a safe space for discussion and debate and to challenge the status quo of how we shape our places and spaces.
This is the first event in our 2023/24 WEdesign programme, People, Place, Planet, which will kick-start our national conversation on the series theme.
How can we think differently about how we shape our places? How can we collaborate more through design and placemaking to value and respect people, place and planet equally?
Using the theme of People, Place, Planet as our starting point, our panel of speakers will offer their thoughts and provocations on our series theme. Discussion will then open up to the whole virtual room.
Our speakers for this event are:
Doug King
Doug King is an engineer with a passion for smart and sustainable urbanism and building design. His work spans urban energy masterplans, holistic energy and resource strategies for new and existing buildings, down to the detail design of building services installations. He has been the engineer behind numerous ground breaking sustainable buildings worldwide including: Sainsbury’s Greenwich; the Genzyme Centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Innovate Green Office in Leeds, the UN EcoBuilding in Podgorica, Montenegro and Trident Park in Malta.
Betty Owoo
Betty Owoo is a London-based spatial designer, educator and writer. She is currently an architectural designer at Be First, where she facilitates the development of social housing and regeneration projects for Barking & Dagenham Council. She is also a founding member of PATCH, a multidisciplinary group that uses writing as a springboard to create spatial interventions and design ephemeral events. In 2022 Betty was selected as a RIBA Journal Rising Star in recognition of her talents and contributions to wider architectural discourse.
As a freelance writer, she is a regular contributor to Dezeen and has also been published in the Architectural Review, Recessed Space, and in the Sound Advice publication Now You Know. She was previously co-chair of the Architecture Foundation Young Trustees, where she implemented a varied curatorial programme that celebrated underrepresented and divergent voices within spatial cultures.
Holly Doron
Holly is an architect with a background in participatory design and teaching, formerly Associate Director of APEC Architects. They are part of the CoLab Dudley team, nurturing conditions for collective imagination and long-term thinking on Dudley High Street. They are doing a collaborative doctoral award with CoLab Dudley, CIVIC SQUARE and Birmingham City University, funded by AHRC through Midlands4Cities, to explore how co-creative architectural processes within social labs might invite collective learning, imagining and action towards regenerative futures.
This is a free event but places are limited. To secure your place, follow the ‘Book now’ button.
About WEdesign
WEdesign is The Glass-House’s annual series of free interactive public events, held online and in-person in cities across the UK, where we explore collaborative design in placemaking through discussion, debate and playful co-design activities.
Our online events create provocative spaces for conversation and are open to participants across the UK and further afield. Our Think Pieces bring together a series of blogs from a range of voices to explore the WEdesign series theme.
WEdesign in-person events are safe spaces for diverse audiences to come together to explore challenging issues and to work collaboratively to generate ideas and solutions, co-designing propositions for changes to culture, policy and practice through hands-on making activities, discussion and debate. These events are co-facilitated by students from our WEdesign Student Programme, in collaboration with our partner universities in cities across the UK.
WEdesign is supported by the Ove Arup Foundation.
Find out more and to book a place at one of our WEdesign in person events in the WEdesign 2023/4 series, People, Place, Planet here.
Find out more about the WEdesign Programme and how we work with partner universities, students and external contributors here.
