The Open University with community partners The Glass-House Community Led Design has been working on a couple of AHRC projects looking at community-led design practices and how we can better understand and support them. As part of these activities we are organising a one-day workshop on Valuing Community-Led Design on the 15th of November in London.
The aim of the workshop is to bring together academics and practitioners interested in participatory, community-led design in order to exchange experiences and share best practice, but also to explore ways to capture the value of community-led design and its impact. It will be interactive and involve group activities.
The second part of the day will be dedicated to the asset mapping methodology we are developing in collaboration with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and which is at the core of our research for the Creative Citizen project. Asset mapping for us is key to understanding the potential that individuals and groups have, their skills, their physical assets, but also their cultural and social capital. Mapping and connecting these unused assets is a step towards further development and we believe can lead to more coherent communities and better quality environments.
At the workshop we will also be launching Community Design Exchange, a social network site and visual gallery developed by the Open University in order to collect and disseminate achievements of community-led design.
We are looking to have a cross-disciplinary input to the event as well as representation from the academia, practice and policy worlds. If you are interested in attending please contact Katerina:
k.alexiou [at] open.ac.uk