The Glass-House Community Led Design
Ove Arup Foundation is set to support a programme run by The Glass-House Community Led Design to provide an event series to be integrated with degree courses for emerging built environment professionals.
The organisation delivers an annual series of free, public facing events called WEdesign, exploring the role of communities in design and placemaking. The events create safe spaces for diverse audiences to come together to explore challenging issues and to work collaboratively on co-designing propositions for changes to culture, policy and practice.
As well as coordinating the event series, The Glass-House works with university partners to integrate the series with student modules and assignments. This includes:
- Injecting Glass-House workshops on design engagement into student modules
- Connecting national Glass-House conversations to live student projects working with place-based initiatives in their local communities
- Using event spaces to build students’ confidence and skills as presenters and facilitators
- Supporting students to share their work and ideas through its networks
- Mentoring students throughout their collaboration with briefing and debriefing sessions
- Creating shared spaces for reflection for students, tutors and event participants
The Glass-House Community Led Design is an independent national charity dedicated to connecting people with the design of their places, and to connecting design with people. It would now like to expand the impact and reach of this programme, creating space for further experimentation and iteration of the various aspects of the WEdesign programme as a pathway to a more strategic approach to creating points of connection, knowledge exchange and collaboration across education, practice, industry, communities and policy through The Glass-House work.
It would like to grow its network of Higher Education partners and also explore how its existing and emergent relationships with other sectors can both contribute to and benefit from the WEdesign programme.
Funding from the Ove Arup Foundation will support a dedicated member of staff to lead the WEdesign programme and its strategic evolution to extend its impact and reach.