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/