post by Sophia de Sousa and Katerina Alexiou

On 12 February, 2020, The Empowering Design Practices research team gathered with partners and community collaborators, colleagues, funders and friends to celebrate five years of research exploring community leadership in design within the context of historic places of worship. This was a day to share learning and the resources produced by the research team, to celebrate community achievements and to explore the potential, opportunities and challenges that these buildings, and their custodians, face in providing welcoming spaces for their whole community.

The project's celebratory conference and exhibition, Empowering Design Practices LIVE was held at St Paul's in Hammersmith, a wonderful example of a church that has reinvented itself and transformed its building and offer to the community. The event was a wonderful opportunity to bring together the wide range of people and organisations that engaged with the project to reflect on work we have done together and to generate ideas and propositions for the future.

The day kicked off with an overview of the project and our key learning points and recommendations, based on our experience of collaborating with over 50 places of worship around the country, as well as professionals and support bodies that work with them. This was a moment to reflect on the specialness of historic places of worship as buildings, and on the custodians tasked with looking after and unleashing the potential in these buildings. Through a design lens, we explored how community leadership, partnership working and effective community engagement can help ensure the long-term sustainability of these buildings, and help support local networks, community development and the life and vibrancy of these much-valued sacred heritage buildings.   

The morning also included a panel discussion of various partners briefly sharing their key reflections and learning points, from the perspective of the organisations and sectors they represent. A key message that came through, articulated brilliantly by Historic England’s Head of Places of Worship and Owners Advice, Diana Evans, was that engagement in design is important, it requires support and capacity building, but it can also be great fun, a space to build confidence and a frame in which important connections, friendships and partnerships can be formed. 

The rest of the day included both panel discussions  and interactive workshop sessions.

Our first panel of invited speakers was made up of representatives of community-led design projects at various points on their journey. Revd Canon Caroline Dick and Churchwarden David Wilcox from St Michael and All Angels, Whitton Gilbert spoke about their Breathing Space project, and the importance of a vision being greater than simply the reordering of the church. They stressed the importance of talking to people, and bringing them with you on a journey to which each person and organisation can contribute in their own way. 

Revd Simon Lockett from St Peter’s Church, Peterchurch spoke of the need to form partnerships, and the importance of being willing to experiment and if necessary, to change direction of travel in response to changing circumstances. He stressed the importance of high quality and values-driven design, and that this can be achieved with varying budgets. 

Revd Geoffrey Eze from All Saints Church, Hanley spoke of the creation of a new enclosed space within their church, and the importance of changes to a building being catalytic, enabling new partnerships and new ways to serve the community as well as the congregation. 

And finally, Adam Yusuf, Chair of Israac Somali Community Association in Sheffield, spoke of the group’s collaboration with the EDP research project, and with The University of Sheffield. These helped grow the e group’s awareness and appreciation for their building as an entity with its own history and identity, and realise the role that design can play in creating opportunities for the building to serve their community objectives. He also spoke of the importance of connecting with other groups taking on similar projects to transform their buildings, and how much they could learn from each other.  

Our panel of professional speakers was tasked with presenting brief provocations from the perspective of an architect, a support officer and a researcher, which then led us into a plenary discussion with the room. 

Some challenging questions and propositions were put to the room: Aidan Potter, Partner at John McAslan Architects quoted Jane Jacobs’ famous words, “Old buildings need new ideas” and challenged the room to be bold in our thinking about what is possible in places of worship. He also reminded us that the design for these buildings has to be a collective endeavour, with the architect simply one element of a complex and collaborative design process. Architect and researcher Nevine Nasser spoke of the relationship between sacred space and sacred experience, and reminded us that faith buildings must integrate into the society that surrounds them. Perhaps the most challenging provocation came from Wendy Coombey, Community Partnership & Development Officer at the Diocese of Hereford, who reminded us that these buildings must be at the service of people, and not the other way around. She asked what would happen if the custodians of these complex listed buildings facing the challenge of innovation and sustainability, simply decided to give the buildings back and opt for alternative spaces to gather and worship.

The exhibition offered a snapshot of the project, with key information and statistics about the activities and groups with which we have collaborated. It also included a section which introduced the wide spectrum of practical resources developed throughout the project and artefacts from public engagement  activities and live student projects. The resources on offer for people to explore and take away included interactive websites Explore Design: community buildings, A Design Thinking Guide, as well as freely downloadable materials such as our Design Project Stories and our series of Designing Places with People booklets, on engaging communities in the design process. The exhibition also introduced emerging resources on working with architects, key topics for consideration when setting off on a project to transform a place of worship, and an online course on community leadership in design. 

We also shared a series of films produced within the project, which include inspiring stories of community engagement in design, a practical resource on using digital media as a design engagement tool, and films capturing our Design Training, a workshop on developing a shared purpose, and related projects Prototyping Utopias and Tate Exchange.

Finally, the exhibition space included a policy corner which invited participants to record thoughts and recommendations about four key questions. Here is a small taster of the ideas that emerged:

How do we connect heritage buildings with the broader context of placemaking? 

• Build links with wider, existing place making strategies locally and nationally to create a cohesive approach. 
• Identify within local planning policy that S106 (CIL) can go towards the reuse of heritage buildings for community/ services/ etc. 

How do we champion and enable community engagement in design decision-making? 

• By showing the local community that changing our buildings will lead to more meaningful resources for the community. 
• By funders encouraging this approach as a precursor to investment, to secure more sustainable projects. A release of funds for project development? 
• By ensuring that they are engaged in the process from the start and listening to them. Solutions shouldn’t be imposed in a top-down approach. ​

How do we raise awareness of the value of historic places of worship in the local economy/ society? 

• Collect feedback from community users and congregations, encourage councils to read it! 
• By not holding up historic places simply as places of beauty but also as useful spaces that can benefit the local community. ​

How do we build capacity for community leadership in the design and adaptation of places of worship? 

• Partnerships with local government and councils for voluntary services.
• Training faith leaders. Central web-based resources, including a list of faith leaders willing to advise others. 
• If owners + funders realised a vital first step was capacity building (if assets are to be protected) they would prioritise this as a first step. You wouldn’t build a house without paying for a land survey first. 

The event offered opportunities for people to engage practically with some of the project’s methods aiming to facilitate collaborative exploration of issues and ideas and the generation of ideas for future actions.

The first workshop of the day (which ran in parallel to the community presentations) brought people together to explore the challenges, assets and opportunities that arise in the efforts to unlock and enhance the potential of historic religious buildings as places of community value. Participants worked in groups to map and connect their ideas about the barriers they face, but also the assets they have (their skills, resources, support) and to collectively come up with suggestions for future actions or processes. Here are some of their suggestions:

• Feeding grassroots knowledge (and longevity and connections) of faith buildings to governance - spreading awareness of Taylor Report
• Creatively connecting communities to construct and share knowledge and ownership 
• Investigate partnerships with local agencies, local councillors, voluntary organisations, local groups and local activities
• Build networks
• Challenge the church establishment to be more radical about what churches can be

The final activity of the day brought everybody together to co-create ideas for possible future collaborations, actions, projects or networks. This ‘cross-pollination’ workshop focused in particular on exploring ways to enable custodians of places of worship to shape the future of their buildings, and the suggestions generated during the morning workshop were brought to bear on people’s thinking. Participants put on the table their resources, current projects and aspirations and explored synergies, connections and new ideas. A champion from each table then moved around to other tables to pitch their ideas and garner further support. At the end of a long day, it was heartening to see the unwilting enthusiasm with which everyone continued to share their knowledge, experience and goodwill to help build capacity in community-led design and support and strengthen communities around historic places of worship.

We would like to thank everyone who attended the day, and shared their stories, reflections and ideas for the future. It is clear that there was fantastic energy and momentum in the room, and that there is much we can do together looking forward.

post by Katerina Alexiou

This was a truly bustling and industrious summer for EDP. The last two posts in this blog reflected on the Design Training delivered in Manchester and two themed workshops focused on the role and potential of faith buildings to serve their communities. My last activity before going away for the summer was a workshop at the Ely Cathedral Conference Centre, which brought together 22 participants from 8 different churches, mainly located in rural areas, who are currently developing plans to repair and update their buildings to increase their use.
 
The workshop aimed to help participants reflect on their assets, challenges and opportunities, share experiences, learn from completed projects and get a taste of some of the activities used in EDP to support people to think about the design of their place and their project.
 
We had run a similar workshop right at the beginning of our research, with 8 different places of worship who travelled to London Lumen from different parts of England for this exchange. This workshop, however, was focused on the particular geographical area around Ely, and the churches were introduced to us through Geoffrey Hunter who acts as Church Buildings Consultant for this Diocese. We also invited participants from the Great Bavington United Reformed Church (in Northumberland), who shared common characteristics and challenges with churches in the Diocese of Ely, despite coming from a completely different geographic area.
 
The assets, challenges and opportunities exercise
The first part of the workshop is an intensive exercise which helps groups identify challenges that stand in their way and immerse themselves in the roots of those challenges, but also gradually moves to a position where they start unearthing assets and coming up with ideas or ways in which their assets can help them overcome those challenges. Key to this exchange is having another group act as critical friends, helping their peers to externalise and clarify their thoughts and visions, often providing advice, creative input and inspiration. The exercise has two rounds, and people rotate around the tables, so that every group has an opportunity to explore their project, as well as act as a critical friend to another.

​Some of the key challenges that the participants identified were understandably related to their location, such as not being visible, not having good access routes, being a long distance away, having a sparse local population. Some churches felt there was an element of competition with other churches who may be in a similar position in the area. Consequently, due to having a small congregation and small local population, participants found funding, and even the prospect of applying for it, extremely difficult.
 
Despite those challenges, all groups considered their small, but dedicated congregations as their key asset: a small number of people who invest their skills and determination to help achieve their mission.  Participants were also aware of the importance and potential of their buildings as historic places to be a focal point in their community. Key opportunities identified were establishing collaboration with local schools and other institutions active in the area and taking advantage of their local surroundings, footpaths, heritage trails etc. 

​Inspirational material and taster workshops
The assets, challenges and opportunities exercise was followed by an inspiration presentation where we shared some examples of projects and interventions that we have come to learn about through our site visits to completed refurbishment or reordering cases. This led to a final session of taster workshops, where participants had the opportunity to explore different themes: demystifying design, mapping assets, harnessing conflicts and fundraising.

This was a really intense workshop, and at the end of the day I felt tired but grateful to the participants who were describing their experience of the day as "inspirational", "useful", "encouraging" and "empowering".
 
We have taken the challenges, assets and opportunities workshop to quite a few places so far: apart from Lumen and Ely, also to churches in Chester and Congleton, to Bow Church and to the Israac Somali Cultural and Community Association in Sheffield.
 
As well as being a vehicle for groups to reflect on what they have and what needs to be done, the feedback we have received suggests that the exercise really helps people to feel that they are not alone in their struggle to make things better for their building, their congregation and their community.

​

post by Vera Hale

On 20th October 2015 the EDP team went to Chester to hold a workshop with churches that are part of the Diocese of Chester and are in the process of undertaking works in their building. The workshop focussed on exploring current challenges, assets and opportunities the churches face, to help plan future support activities: for these churches in Chester but also other churches who face similar issues when redeveloping their premises. 

Two churches took part in the exercise. The first was St Peter’s Church, Chester, a Grade I listed red sandstone Gothic building. Located in the heart of Chester, it does not strike you as being an active place of worship; the cab driver that took us there for our site visit was adamant that this was not a functioning church. But it is an open church. As you come in the building through a flight of steps on the North on Chester Cross, you find there is a nice café, bustling with cups and saucers and chatter - it is a place to take a break from the business of the city. The church’s aspiration is to improve the café facilities and to make the interior work better for the activities that they hold in it. The second church was St Peter in Congleton. Also a Grade I listed church it has just had mayor roof repairs and is now looking to ‘unlock the future for all’ and to re-order parts of the interior to improve provision, access and inclusiveness for the community of Congleton and ensure the building’s resilience.

IEach group got a chance to look at their own challenges, assets and opportunities but also play the role of a critical friend for the other, asking questions and providing feedback and ideas.

The workshop proved to be a great way to use design thinking to talk about the issues at hand such as finance and funding, design and identity, limitations of the buildings relating to their Grade I status, as well as issues around community participation and involvement of the congregation. Lots of food for thought for all parties involved.

We are using the same type of workshop with other places of worship - keep checking our website for updates about these workshops as well as to learn about our findings.

post by Katerina Alexiou

A central aim of the Empowering Design Practices project is to develop methods, tools, resources and mechanisms to support people embarking on projects for refurbishing and enhancing local places of worship. But before we can develop new things, we need to look at past practice: How did other people do it? How did their journey look like? What kind of places they created? What are the pitfalls of the process and how they can be overcome?
 
To inform our own practice, we therefore set up a strand of work called Learning from the Past. The research includes interviews, focus groups, workshops, and a number of visits to past projects. These site visits offer a way to experience the place and engage with the people who relate to it: those who were originally involved in envisioning a new future for their building and who saw it through, but also current users, worshipers, visitors, or people using its services.
 
In this blog, I would like to recount our first site visit to St. Luke’s Church in Oxford and share some thoughts and observations.

The site visit
We were all excited about visiting St. Luke’s. Becky Payne (our valued expert on sustaining historic places of worship) had already written a case study about the project. St. Luke’s is not a renovation project like the ones we intend to focus on for our support, but the church was rebuilt retaining to a great extend the footprint and character of the original building. A really inspiring example, from which we felt we can learn a lot, particularly about the way the steering team led the re-design process while creatively engaging with the wider community in one of the poorer parts of Oxford.
 
It helped that it was a glorious day when we visited, but the first impressions approaching the building were really positive. The entry to the building was smooth and the main hall looked big, bright and tidy. The space gave the impression of a well looked after community centre but it combined a sense of spirituality. In this minimalist space, a beautiful unconventional painting of the last supper drew our attention instantly conveying so much about the principles behind the creation of this space.

The main room has cupboards all around the periphery, which are used for storage, and there is a mezzanine level on its short side. Beside the main room there is a kitchen area, and beyond that a connecting space leading to the ‘Chill out’ room - a space mainly used by children and youth groups, with sofas, a second kitchen area, a standalone sink, a pool and a juke box.

The walkabout
Following a quick lunch and introductions to the project and to each other we divided in three groups to walk around the building. Each group was tasked with discussing a different topic: architecture, heritage, and community, particularly focussing on how changes in the building have affected people’s lives and perceptions.

Participants talked about a feeling of cosiness the Chill Out room has, welcoming different types of users and different types of uses, including art, dance (from ballroom to street dance), cooking, mother and toddler group activities and even just listening to music and playing pool. All these activities happen often alongside worshipping, and the Hungarian and occasionally also the Asian Church also rent the space out for their own service.
 
The building was designed to allow wheelchair access, which necessitated moving the entrance to the side. This was originally met with disapproval by the local authority planners, who expected to have an entrance to such a public building on the front and at a distance from the surrounding private flats. Indeed we found out that there were many negotiations between the architect, the steering committee and the council throughout the whole process, and people in the community also came in with their perceptions and requirements about the place, whether for a small thing like the sink in the Chill Out room or something bigger, like the façade of the building.

These negotiations extended to the perception of heritage different people had as this extract from the discussion shows:

Mapping milestones and assets
The second part of our visit focussed on mapping milestones in the process from the start of the project until now, but also the assets associated with key events: the people, skills, tools and resources that made things happen. We used a map with some key events pre-drawn, based on the interview we had already conducted with the church warden.
 
It was a lively discussion and bit more disordered than we had planned! Thinking about the key events and their succession, helped participants recall and reflect on the process. Doing this as a group helped create a more complete picture. The initial phases of the project drew most of their attention, as they were rightly the most intensive, the most difficult and the most defining. The process had its highs and lows, and there were many setbacks as well as achievements.

There were plans to replace St. Luke’s going back to the 1980’s. But the journey which kicked off the transformation of St. Luke’s into what it is now started in 2005 when the steering group formed. A first proposal was designed with the help of students from Oxford Brookes University. Then around 2007 come another design, which included private flats to help generate revenue to maintain the building, but the plan didn’t get permission due to requirements relating to an elevated flood risks in the area. This also started an on-going consultation with local residents, which revealed their will to maintain the church as a community landmark and resource.
 
Constant community engagement was one of the key characteristics of the project that made it so successful, and so was working in partnership with other local faith and secular organisations; engaging with local media; and combining multiple sources of funding.

A key point in the discussion was when we asked the team about their values and what made them persevere in the face of numerous difficulties over a long period of time:

Epilogue
St Luke’s moto is ‘love in action’. This was what drove the process and what drives the group’s everyday activities and use of the space now.
 
During the workshop a group of three youngsters appeared on the door. They hesitated a bit to get in when they saw us, but they were immediately welcomed in. We could see they felt at home and one was confident enough to share his view about the place. I thought, maybe that is where it all starts, in giving people voice and confidence.
 
I feel privileged to have met the people and I have learned a lot. Below I include a list of top tips that the team suggested to us, to help others embarking on a similar journey.
 
Watch this space for more blogs about our visits to past projects.

Top tips from St. Luke's, Oxford

• Capturing imagination – visualising the project
• Ensuring a mix of skills – getting people in early
• Flexible design of project – contingency
• Engage the community
• Be clear about what you are/your values
• Patience and insistence
• Design to allow mix of as many groups/users as possible
• See if you can phase the project
• Lottery funding useful early on (but only early on)
• Divide responsibilities and respect each other’s skills

post by Katerina Alexiou

Through my engagement in participatory design and community-led design in the last four to five years, I have come across the concept of value from multiple perspectives, both as worth and as meaning (moral principles). Thinking about value and values is in fact inevitable in any research activity that engages with people and wishes to have an impact in society. A key issue is to understand and develop methods to capture the benefits of such activity, going beyond simple economic terms (for example, considering effects on culture or the environment). But value by definition requires some sort of judgement that something is beneficial or good, and this is where the notion of values comes to play. Values in a sense designate what value is.

Participatory design is by definition concerned with people’s values. The participatory design movement was borne out of a commitment to consider users’ and stakeholders’ values and give them voice in the design process. As Iversen et al (2012) discuss, aside a general commitment to democratic ideals, in a participatory design process values are not given a priori but actually ‘emerge in collaboration’. So a significant function of methods developed to support participation and co-design is ‘cultivating the emergence of values’ and facilitating their development and realization.

One of the core questions or aims of the Empowering Design Practices project is to understand how personal values and perceptions of heritage, faith and place influence involvement in and ownership of community-led design projects and how they can be woven effectively into community-led design practices. We thought however, that before we were able to start engaging with communities and facilitate a values-based process, it was important to follow a values-based approach in our own collaboration process as project team.

So in this blog, I would like to report on what we have done so far as a team to unearth and build on our values in order to design and carry out the project activities. But before I discuss what we did, I think it is useful to present some previous work and experience with co-design projects, which led to the formation of our approach.

Value(s) and assets

At the same time with my colleagues at the Creative Citizens project we also started exploring the notion of assets as a shortcut to the term value. Assets are the tangible and intangible things individuals and groups hold, or have access to, and that can be mobilised to produce common goods. This can be anything from skills and knowledge, to relationships with other groups and organisations, access to communal spaces or infrastructures, cultural assets, or media. In the Creative Citizen project asset mapping became our central approach and tool for co-design. The method we used aimed to engage participants in exploring and sharing their perceptions about what is valuable. This helped build community relationships, facilitate the collaborative generation of ideas, but also to ‘measure’ or ‘evaluate’ the process and the outcomes of our project: the new assets and the relationships between assets generated. You can read here about this work.

Starting from values

When I got involved in the Scaling up Co-design project the team adopted a values-led asset-based approach early on in its practice. The project required building community-university partnerships in order to co-design the research and co-deliver its activities. It was recognized that in order for the project to be successful and useful for everyone involved, the research aims and activities should be designed around existing interests, resources and needs. We developed different ways to facilitate this process, from individual profiles, to design workshops, card sorting exercises, and the creation of impact and values maps. Being clear about everyone’s agendas and values helped create a safe space for sharing, and also fostered innovation. Check out the project video.

This experience led to our involvement in the Starting from Values: evaluating intangible legacies project. The Starting from Values project focussed on values as a lens through which to explore and capture the legacies of collaborative projects. Here for example is a poster of the Scaling up Values and Legacies that resulted from this investigation.

Building on this knowledge and practice a group of us took the opportunity to create an approach suitable for our work in the Empowering Design Practices.

The Empowering Design Practices case

So let me give a bit more detail about the methods we used to share and reflect on values in this project. In the first team meeting, everyone taking part completed a ‘profile’ sheet, which captured individual research interests, as well as individual principles for collaboration (how we work together as partners), action (what values guide project activities) and success (what makes a good research project). Similar profiles were used in the Scaling up project but were adapted here to help reflect more specifically on values and expected benefits (value).

We came back to these values on our third team meeting, focussing specifically on relationships between values and (potential) legacies. We grouped the principles we discussed in the first meeting as follows:

Values: 
Open: Open exchange of information, ideas and priorities
Respectful: Drawing on and respecting what everyone brings to the project
Strategic: Acknowledge diverse wider agendas, but be clear about what are the shared interests
Inclusive: Collective approach to problem solving but not everyone needs to be involved in everything (aware of different time commitments)
Impactful: Constantly asking ‘What will this achieve that will make things different and better in the future’?
Reflective: Activities should be captured, evaluated and shared
Accessible: Outcomes and resources must be accessible to our key audiences

Legacies:
Better places: Contributed to the creation of more inclusive and sustainable places of worship
Empowered people: People that look after places of worship are empowered to lead projects
Capacity: Professionals (e.g. architects and support officers) as well as communities use the produced training and practical resources
Improved policy making: The evidence and knowledge produced influenced policymaking
Innovation: The project developed innovative research and practice approaches

We created a box to help us work with these statements. More specifically the aim of our activity was to think about where we want to be at the end of the project in 2019, how we are going to go towards that direction and what we want to capture in this journey as evidence of our success. We placed on the horizontal axis our values statements (these were our shared principles of collaboration and principles of action) and on the vertical axis we positioned legacies, statements expressing where we want to be in 2019 (drawn from our principles of success). We then invited everyone in the room to look again at the statements and identify any gaps or corrections but also (and more importantly) to think about the relation between Values and Legacies and then try to identify actions or mechanisms that would help us achieve those legacies AND/OR evidence a certain legacy. We thought that thinking about the relation between values and legacies is a prompt that may help us think differently and help capture legacies that we often ignore.

The tables below summarise the connections we drew together.

Many of these ideas have already been put in motion. But we will continue reflecting on our values and hope to use our treasure box to record the legacies of the project as they become reality. We will report more on the subject as things progress, but as further food for thought I provide some useful links below to other projects relating to the subject of value. Get in touch if you wish to discuss this project with us!

References:

Iversen, O. S., Halskov, K.  and Leong, T.W. ‘Values-led Participatory Design’, In  CoDesign 8 (2–3): 87–103

Links:

Starting from Values project report: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/starting-from-values-evaluating-intangible-legacies/learning-and-outcomes#Starting%20from%20values%20booklet

The Cultural Value project blog: https://culturalvalueproject.wordpress.com/

Cultural Value Networks report: http://www.dcrc.org.uk/research/cultural-value-networks-research-findings/