Who needs to engage and How: A Design Thinking Guide

Think about who needs to engage in the process and how

Whether you are thinking about small alterations and reorderings, or bigger changes, it is important to take into consideration the people that are likely to be affected by those changes, and to understand their wants and needs. Engaging with the different individuals and groups that use and interact with your building, or can be potential users and beneficiaries in the future, helps make better, more informed, more creative and more sustainable decisions. There are different ways and tools to engage with people in the questions leading to the formation of your design rationale.

Resources

The Empowering Design Practices project has developed different resources that can help you understand, why and how to engage with a variety of people, at different stages in your process.

Designing places with people booklets. This resource consists of a set of booklets focussing on different issues:

Transforming historic places of worship through community engagement. This booklet offers a basic introduction to community engagement in design, taking into consideration the sensitivities of historic places of worship.
Tips for your community engagement strategy. This booklet provides advice on how to develop an effective strategy for engaging others in your project. It will help you develop a broad understanding of the value and various objectives of engagement and is useful for communities and professionals alike.
Making community engagement count. This booklet provides advice and inspiration to help you plan how to use different approaches and methods of eliciting community views and opinions and to capture data and evidence that is useful for your project.

Stories of community engagement in design.

These two films tell the stories of St Luke’s Church in Oxford and Graylingwell Chapel in Chichester. They offer great examples of projects transforming faith buildings using inclusive and creative methods to engage with their wider community, and provide information and inspiration for others embarking on a similar journey.