How to Support the Creation of a Design Vision: an example

The short film above was shot during a two-day Design Training course course delivered as part of the Empowering Design Practices course in Sheffield. The course brought together four community groups at the early stages of re-thinking the use and physical elements of their buildings to develop their design skills, knowledge and confidence. The film shares the experiences of participants, and what they perceived to be the benefits of this approach.

In the course, participants engaged in a number of different activities:

• They explored some key architectural terms and learned about the RIBA stages of work
• They visited other places of worship and heritage buildings to gain inspiration and to learn from their process (the things that worked and the things that failed)
• They collaboratively explored and mapped the challenges and opportunities of their buildings
• Drawing on all these activities, they finally worked together to create a shared design vision and presented it to other groups for feedback. They used a collaging activity to express the vision as a combination of text and images and built a physical model of their building, to explore how the vision can be realised.

Now consider the following question and post your ideas in the comments section below:

• In the film, participants mention the creation of the physical model, as something new to them and thus quite challenging. What are you thoughts about this? Do you think that others would find this activity challenging, and how would you help them overcome their hesitation?