Valuing Community-Led Design

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The ideas and practice of community-led design, participatory design or co-design have a long-standing tradition, especially in the context of urban design, planning and architecture. Community-led design goes beyond the one-dimensional process of consultation, helping involve people in decision-making throughout the design process, from visioning to implementation. There are many benefits from this approach, from improving civic participation and ensuring more democratic outcomes, to creating a strong sense of community and strengthening people's attachment to their place and to each other, to producing more sustainable solutions. However, 50 years after the first community-led design initiatives, and although professionals and organisations involved have reached a stage of maturity, community-led design is far from being mainstream in design and planning practice. An essential part of this problem is that the benefits of the approach are not thoroughly understood, measured or disseminated. The project aims to grapple with this problem, by exploring how a better case for community-led design can be made. This involves collecting and sharing evidence of good practice, collaboratively exploring measures of value and impact, and importantly, identifying ways for articulating and disseminating the benefits of community-led design. Grappling with this problem is of particular relevance at this particular time, with the emerging Localism agenda and the National Planning Policy Framework, which foresee an increased need for early and meaningful engagement and collaboration with communities. The project will deliver network and workshop events bringing together a variety of stakeholders in order to map the existing landscape of community-led design practice, connect good practice and identify its value. Stakeholders will include individuals from public bodies (policy makers, local authority representatives), third sector organisations mediating community-led design, independent organisations offering support and advice on design and creative economy, local communities, design and creative professionals and researchers. Alongside these events we will develop and implement a social networking platform (based on the Open University's Open Design Studio technology) in order to gather individual stories and experiences from participation in community-led design from all over the UK (including photos, videos and text). This will allow further collection, analysis, articulation and dissemination of evidence on the benefits of community-led design, leading to the creation of a clear research agenda for the future.