Written by:
Sophia de Sousa
Our final event in this year’s WEdesign programme, Multigenerational Places: Newcastle on 10 March, was a little different from the others in the series. A collaboration with Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape and the Farrell Centre, the university’s urban room, this event had a particular focus on how we can better engage communities in shaping places that both cater for people of different ages and that create opportunities to bring them together.
As we had in our previous WEdesign events in Newcastle, we collaborated with Armelle Tardiveau, Senior Lecturer and Dr Alkistis Pitsikali, Lecturer, in Architecture. 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 and created a design competition to help inspire and activate the students to co-design engagement activities. Our hope is that, as well as contributing to the students’ learning journey, the challenge will generate ideas and approaches that can also be shared beyond Newcastle with both practitioners and communities.
Multigenerational Places: Newcastle became a forum, 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 engagement 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. Following the event and exhibition, students will have the opportunity to further refine and test these engagement activities before submitting them for their module and for The Glass-House design competition.
As well as creating an invaluable safe space for experimentation for the students, and the opportunity to connect with members of their local community, Multigenerational Places: Newcastle created a unique opportunity for members of the public to step into a kind of design engagement laboratory. They tried the eleven different engagement activities, spoke to the students about the local place questions being explored, and were able to share their views and give feedback on the engagement activities and associated props and prompts. The energy in the room was electric.
This kind of engagement marketplace was then followed by a talk from me, drawing on The Glass-House work to explore and innovate the role of engagement in informing design and placemaking, and in creating social value opportunities as well as built outcomes. It was great to see so many people interested in hearing from us.
With participants representing a spectrum of ages, backgrounds and specialisms, and the range of activities designed by the students, the event created a rich space for conversation about how our places are working for us, and how they might be improved. Students explored questions around: accessibility and movement within and across the city for people with different needs; real and perceived safety on roads and in the public realm more broadly; creating spaces for girls and young women. They paid particular attention to how they might engage diverse people in the conversation, and how participation might raise greater awareness and empathy for the needs of others.
“It was nice to see considerations for public spaces and to see problems that I struggled with myself brought up.”
Hats off to all the students. They created some inspiring and inspired design engagement activities. They had clearly done their research and got creative about prompts to activate conversation. Despite some of them feeling a little nervous about stepping into this space, they did a fantastic job of taking lots of people through the activities in a short space of time. Those who attended embraced this different kind of event and showed both curiosity and generosity for the students, as did the students with each other.
“I was really impressed at how thoughtful and aware so many of the students were about their subjects.”
“I was impressed with the many ways each group found for participants’ input and how spaces were represented. Flags, collages, drawings and speech bubbles are all fun to use. “
Those attending commented on the interactivity, playfulness and quality of some of the props created, but also that the activities had made them think about things that had not necessarily occurred to them before, for example the difference that light can make to people’s experience of a place.
They thought about how to draw people into a conversation, and to get them involved in all kinds for different interactions, from role play, to drawing and collaging to mapping. They collected people’s ideas, experiences and creative input.
“Impressed by the empathy for different people and their lives experience of space!”
“Being able to point out and record the unsafe aspects of my daily journeys and spaces felt like recording something actionable. Something that we can just quickly do to marginally improve the lives of thousands, even if little bits at a time.”
There were too many activities and great ideas for me to detail in this blog, and the students are still evolving their ideas, so we will be drawing together a collection of the student design engagement activities in a compilation a little later this spring.
We will also be adding the voices of those who took part in this event to our Multigenerational Places Manifesto, also coming soon.
Thanks again to the students and event participants who came together and contributed so much to this creative and fruitful space. We are also grateful to Armelle Tardiveau and Alkistis Pitsikali at Newcastle University and to Owen Hopkins at the Farrell Centre for working with us to make the event and exhibition happen.