Published 2026
This publication captures design engagement ideas and prompts designed by students at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. They were in response to a design challenge we set to students at part of our event Multigenerational Places: Newcastle, the final event in the Glass-House 2025/26 WEdesign series, Multigenerational Places.
This was a collaboration with Armelle Tardiveau, Senior Lecturer and Dr Alkistis Pitsikali, Lecturer, in Architecture at Newcastle University. They linked the WEdesign Student Programme to a specific degree module with a focus on participation, which sees students working on local matters of concern with people and groups they refer to as “city actors” within the community. As part of this module, students work in groups to co-design engagement activities to spark conversations with local people. In February, The Glass-House did a workshop with the students on design engagement to help inspire and activate the students to co-design engagement activities. We set them the challenge to share their design engagement ideas with the public at our Multigenerational Places: Newcastle event in March.
Multigenerational Places: Newcastle became a safe space for students to both showcase and test their engagement ideas and the associated props and prompts, with the public. Following the event, the student engagemet activities were exhibited at the Farrell Centre for four days, so that people could drop in and interact with them at different times of the day and week.
For most of the students, this was their first experience of both designing and facilitating design engagement activities. The Glass-House, their tutors and our participating public were all blown away by the variety of ideas and activities the students came up with, and by the way they handled themselves in this busy engagement marketplace.
This publication offers a glimpse of their engagement activities, and extracts some of the great ideas that we hope will inspire anyone setting out on their own journey to engage people in shaping their local places.
We are grateful to Armelle, Alkistis and participating students at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape and the Farrell Centre. A huge thanks also goes to the participants of all ages who engaged with the student activities with such generosity and enthusiasm.
About Multigenerational Places
WEdesign 2025/26 was collaboration between The Glass-House and a range of partners across sectors and communities. Together, we convened a national conversation exploring the theme of Multigenerational Places. Our 2025/26 WEdesign series asked how we can create places that better meet the needs of our different generations and at the same time, help us better connect with each other across age groups. Multigenerational Places brought people together through in-person and online co-design events, a student programme and design competition, and a series of think pieces.
You can read more about the full WEdesign 2025/26 programme in our series publication Multigenerational Places: Reflections on the 2025/26 WEdesign Event Series.
