Research Room 3: Empowering Design Practices

About this session

In this session we will look back on the project, Empowering Design Practices. This 7-year project explored the landscape of historic places of worship and communities leading change within them. We worked with communities to explore the values that inspire and hinder the wider use of historic places of worship and what benefits and impacts community-led design practices can bring.

Working with live projects, we also co-designed new practices and practical resources, providing hands-on support to communities to help them lead projects to transform their historic places of worship. Through this work, we drew on a variety of design and other creative research methods to investigate how inclusive design processes can support a diverse spectrum of people, organisations and places.

Areas of Exploration

Themes we will explore in this session include:

• Exploring different ways to empower communities to and through design
• Exploring the intersection of faith, heritage and community
• Exploring different types of design capacity building for communities, and the impact both on the projects and people involved
• Engaged collaborative research as a space to create a wide range of practical resources for communities and professionals.

You might like to have a look at the Empowering Design Practices website before joining this session. However, this is entirely optional. Do also feel free to just turn up and find out more.

Book your free place now.

About Research Rooms

The Research Rooms series is a collaboration between national charity The Glass-House Community Led Design and The Open University's Design Group. These events share learning, resources and anecdotes from the many research projects we have done together.

Research Rooms are informal online spaces for discussion with members of the research team from academia, practice and communities. Those attending can learn about the projects, their outputs and outcomes and the influence they have had on those involved. There will also be space to share your own experience and explorations of the project themes.

More about Empowering Design Practices

This seven-year collaborative research project was the largest project in the Design and Communities strand funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It explored how community-led design can help empower those who look after historic places of worship to create more open, vibrant and sustainable places that respect and enhance their heritage. Working within this context, the project developed tools, resources and training to support community-led design practice and research to support any community-led design process for the built environment. The project was a collaboration between The Open University, The Glass-House Community Led Design, Historic England, National Lottery Heritage Fund, Historic Religious Buildings Alliance, working with consultants Stephen Smith (Wright & Wright Architects), Leo Care (Live Works) and Becky Pane.

If you would like to explore the project before the Research Room session, there are plenty of resources available:

• Empowering Design Practices website
• Empowering Design Practices Live Event & Exhibition Catalogue and an accompanying film, produced by Emma Crouch, beautifully captures the day and the key messages that emerged.
• Empowering Design Practices practical resources produced by the project team