Architecture for kids podcast with Elly Mead Former Design Champion at The Glass-House Community Led Design

Elly joined the podcast to talk about how The Glass-House approaches working with young people as active participants in the continual shaping of the built environment around them.

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

you

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablão. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Wells School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Elie Mead. Eli is an architectural designer who embeds collaborative design into the heart of a practice. Eli is a former design champion at the Glasshouse Community-Led Design, a national design charity committed to connecting people with the design of their places and connecting design with people. Working often with children and young people, using hands-on and creative methods to unpick architectural ideas in order to enable young people as placemakers in the here and now. The Glasshouse Community-Led Design is a national charity that supports communities, organisations and networks to work collaboratively on the design of buildings, open spaces, homes and neighbourhoods. They see design not only as a tool for creating great places, but also as a way to connect people and empower them with enhanced confidence, skills and a greater sense of agency. Eli, thank you for talking to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_01: 1:54

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55

What subject were you good at school and what was your favourite subject at school?

SPEAKER_01: 2:01

I think that's a really interesting one. And as someone who studied architecture, maybe I have a bit of an unusual answer. My favourite subject was actually biology. I was really interested in understanding how things get put together and how things work and how systems work and then how they feed into each other to create often a whole that is greater than its parts. And I think that translates a lot to architecture, in particular to urban design and placemaking, because our places are made up of lots of little parts, not necessarily big holes as you come across. I'd say the subject I was best at, though, is probably math, which tracks well, although like architectural education isn't as mathematical as I was led to believe at 16. I enjoyed math.

SPEAKER_00: 2:50

That's what I was going to ask you next, if it helped you in your career. I

SPEAKER_01: 2:53

think the maths that I studied studied at school was very towards the end of your education it becomes almost quite theoretical you know you're working out angles on curves and I haven't thankfully been asked to do that in architecture yet but I think that base understanding that being good with numbers being able to calculate areas and underscores yeah changes scale and understand space actually that that volumetric idea of of how space is occupied that's been really useful and the methodology as well. For me, maths was very methodical. It was going through a certain series of steps and I take that through into all of the tasks that I approach now as an adult into sitting down, breaking in smaller pieces and then being able to attack it.

SPEAKER_00: 3:44

You are a design champion at the Glasshouse community-led design. Tell us a bit what it is to be a design champion and tell us something about what the Glasshouse community The

SPEAKER_01: 3:57

Glasshouse Community-Led Design, we're a charity that works across the UK and internationally. We're very small, actually based in Marland in London, and there's four of us at the moment. And what we do is we work in the space between communities, practitioners, policy makers, everybody essentially, to try and connect the dots so that we all understand how design works in our built environment, the power of it, and we champion the its ability to create positive change effectively. So that's where my job title comes from. I'm a design champion. When I tell people that, they often look at me slightly vacantly. But essentially, my role at The Glass House is about shouting about the power of design. And I do that in all of our strands of work. We support communities who are going through different design processes, whether that's already formed community groups or communities working in areas that are undergoing regeneration or huge shifts in what's happening in places. We work with practitioners and talking to them about how do you engage with people? How do you talk to people about design? And often we don't recognize as practitioners of architecture that we're speaking in like archy jargon because we undergo so much kind of training and education and you live in a very specific world. You use a lot of terms that don't mean anything to a lot of other people so we try to connect the dots there we also do a lot of action research so we've been working with the design group at the Open University for about 10 years now actually do a lot of research projects that look at the mechanisms of creating community and community-led action we're really passionate about the fact that places are made up of people it's the people that create places in the spaces around us and by connecting communities and people we're and places back together. We can create cities, towns, villages that work better for all of us.

SPEAKER_00: 6:01

You do a lot of work with kids as well and young people. Any particular project that you want to talk to us about? I

SPEAKER_01: 6:07

do a lot of work with young people. I think there's a couple that I've been lucky enough to be involved with during my time at the Glasshouse. There is one coming up that we're doing as part of the London Festival of Architecture this year. It would be good to talk about. It's called Co-Creating a Collaborative City. It's an open-day It's open to absolutely anyone, to families, to lone individuals, to friends of any age. And we're inviting people to join us at Beauchat in East London to co-create, to co-design a collaborative city using recycled materials from their local neighbourhood. So what that will entail is us talking about, you know, what do you want to see in a city? What spaces are important to you? What are the spaces in between the buildings that you love, that you you occupy and how do you want to create those and then how do we come together to put that city together it's talking a lot about the communication that we need to create places and I would say that's almost the underlying current through all of our work our work is very very varied but it's always about communication it's about how do we talk to each other to create places not how do we create places alone or you know how do organizations create places so that's a really interesting one for me anyway that's coming up I would say maybe a good one to talk about in the past would be last summer we worked with a group of young women from the Baytree Centre in South London which is a women and girls educational charity and really fantastic centre look it up if you're ever around Brixton and we worked with a group of girls there to talk to them about what design means to them. So we did a series of workshops that were talking to them about architectural principles or built environment principles, but really breaking it down in a way that they could relate to. And essentially what we were trying to do at the end of the workshop was to get them to choose a place that they love. Some of them chose their nan's home. Some of them chose a field out in West Sussex. And it was about them thinking about places, thinking about why a place felt special and being able to break that down into that felt special because there are certain aspects of the design that make me feel safe or, you know, the use of material here. I really love that colour and that's my connection. It was about uncovering their connection to place and relating it back to their experience of the world.

SPEAKER_00: 8:45

Once you mentioned co-design, it will be interesting for you to define co-design. Second, shed some light on the process of communication.

SPEAKER_01: 8:52

I'll start with the easiest bit of that question, which is the definition of co-design I think co-design is one of those words that we see branded around a lot at the moment and people don't necessarily understand the process or the context of it for me co-design is shorthand for collaborative design it's where you bring people into your design process so that can happen at lots of different scales so often I think of design as a squiggly line and it's not linear as off you know as much as we would love for design processes to be very linear and easy it wiggles back a forward over itself in lots of different places and through that process you have planning you have building regulation but code design for me is the opportunities that you give other people to be part of your design process and whether that is very light touch you know if you think of the scale of participation towards the bottom you have consultation and asking people their opinion that for me is still part of code design or the way up to taking someone through a design process with you. So that would be starting with kind of capacity building. So doing training sessions, talking to them about breaking down the language of architecture and the built environment and urban design through to doing workshops that explore their lived experience and their lived knowledge of a place. The end of co-designing, and I've used that word again, co-designing architectural outcomes or architectural solutions for a problem. That's co-design for me, which is a bit of a big definition. Why communication is so important? I think it probably stems from the Glass House's start. So we started as an action research project, which is just kind of research through doing. That's what action research means. And communication has always been at the heart of what we've been doing. We were essentially a collaboration between different organisations and communication was essential to give birth to the work that we do. So often when we step into different design situations, people have forgotten how to talk to each other or talk to larger groups of people about places and that can be because people are fearful of of what others might say it might be because there are so many people especially that live in cities these days those conversations can feel hard to get a handle on but actually the root of our work is finding that we have more in common with each other than we have separates us there there is more that brings us together and if you can use good communication to find those you know those golden threads those commonalities between us, you can create places that work for all of us and we can protect the values that are really important, kind of cast away the noise that sometimes can get into design processes.

SPEAKER_00: 11:48

What is the Glasshouse community-led design bringing to the conversation in terms of inspiring young people?

SPEAKER_01: 11:55

Often we find in design processes that young people are thought of as placemakers in the next generation, individuals to be prepped and perhaps listen to tomorrow or in five years or in 10 years. And actually what we try and do through our work is advocate for young people to be heard in the here and now. We find that like places that are designed with young people in mind that are accessible, that are safe to travel through, that invite play, that actually suitable and accessible for everyone. If you design to that base, everyone thrives and is better off for that process and I think that young people have a particularly interesting view of the world as soon as you kind of age out of childhood the context in which young people are growing up today is immediately different to the context in which you grew up in and I think it's really important to listen to those voices because they tell you things about the built environment that you potentially haven't noticed because you live in it as an adult and you occupy those spaces as an adult. Another thing that we try and bring into our work is this feeling of agency and of power. Sometimes we call it empowerment. I think that's an interesting discussion because my argument would be that people already have power. We're just reconnecting them to it. As a young person, you're often not asked, what would you do here? What would you want with this space? What's important to you? And I think those questions are really important in helping children consider who they are, how they fit into their places, what makes those places tick, and then how they can feed into them. So a lot of it for me is about building this idea of almost citizenship. In the now, they take care of their places, but also in the future. And they understand that to create healthy places, we all have to feed into the maintenance, the design and the creation of them. I think thinking of kind of architectural urban design as this passive process that we're not involved with leads to places that people don't feel at home.

SPEAKER_00: 14:03

You talked about communication, working with young people, giving them voice. But one of the things that some of the guests have mentioned is that a lot of professionals don't feel like they can't work with young people because they don't know how. How do you deal with that process? And do you also work with professionals to teach them how to work with young people? Or if not, how is your process that you do that perhaps you inform other professionals on how to do it?

SPEAKER_01: 14:32

It's funny. This is something a lot of my friends say to me when I talk about working with young people they say I'm never short to say to young people anymore and it's it kind of strikes me as funny because we've all been young people we've all seen that kind of panic in an adult's eyes and understood that they're scared about talking to us I would say the glass house a lot of our methods are about bringing young people into the design conversation as designers so an example I would give of this is we do it's called a gaming work So we use a gaming program called Roblox. If you have children, they are probably on it. It's kind of similar to Minecraft, but it has a lot more design lens in it. So it was originally created so young people and anyone really could design video games. So you can create landscapes, you can create environments. This is kind of a piece of software that we thought, ah, kids are already occupying this space. This is a space that they are really confident in. and they know what they are doing. So using that gaming platform, we talk to the young people about what design is. So we introduce them to form, feeling, function. We talk about how our senses connect to how we perceive and experience space. So what you can see and what you can feel and how that relates to materiality or how light gets into a building. And then we set them off on a design task and get them to design. We've done house we've done community buildings and we're doing one this summer as well and working with kids looking at kind of play spaces how they'd like to design play spaces and I think this it switches the role so first of all it puts the young people in the position of power if you will it makes them the expert in that space and that confidence is so kind of amazing and impressive to see because it shifts their footing from being the student to the teacher and it allows them to know that there are skills and experiences that they can offer us too it's not just that one way kind of communication we also normally bring their parents into these workshops as well so you know we separate them for a little bit to talk about play with different generations and then we bring them back together to design together and there is something about creating space for adults and children to play together and that is really important and vital. I think adults aren't encouraged to play in us and there's something, I was saying this earlier, but there's something slightly taboo about playing as an adult and bringing them together allows them to appreciate their child in a different light, see that designer, to see those.

SPEAKER_00: 17:22

You're empowering Indian people to become designers but they don't have the expertise. At the end of the day, you are the expert. How do you create that balance?

SPEAKER_01: 17:30

It's a tricky question and it it changes in each of our workshops because the group of children that we work with are always completely different they are made up of different sets of personalities they have different levels of confidence and skill and I think it's about giving them that space in a really I don't want to say a controlled environment but a very supported environment talking about the workshop where we work with parents there is someone familiar to them that they feel confident speaking to so that's almost that comfort, that familiarity, which means maybe they're a little bit braver in talking to the rest of the class or the rest of the group. The other environment that we do that workshop in is actually schools. And I think there's something interesting about working in schools with kind of already preformed groups of children that have friendships, that have relationships. And especially in a school setting, kids can feel really at home. Sometimes I know that's not true for all children, but you see kind of a swag and a confidence when you walk into their classroom and and they're very much like yes you're coming into my space I think it's about again that communication that tone of the workshop about how you set yourself up and you say yes I'm an architectural designer or I'm a design champion at the glass house and these are the things that I know a lot about but I don't know a lot about this part of your experience can you tell me more and I think it's about these open-ended questions that invite the children to share with you or the young people to share with you and really listening I mean we talk a lot about active listening in our work and how just seeing someone take on board something that you're saying and then action it is amazing it's such an important kind of experience for these young people and I think using the gaming platform it allows us to like immediately create their ideas so they're getting a very like tangible outcome straight away from the conversations that we're having.

SPEAKER_00: 19:34

Who are your clients in general? And how do they come to you? Or do you go to them? How does that process work? And what are the challenges in what you do?

SPEAKER_01: 19:46

As a charity, we are really lucky, actually, in the way that we work. We have a core funder that came from kind of the Glasshouse Trust, which was the organisation that set up the Action Research Group over 20 years ago now. We bid for different pots of funding. We're not always successful or the funding landscape is difficult at the moment so that's kind of our charity arm and that means that a lot of the work we do we can offer on a supportive basis where we don't take payment that's our work as a charity and then we also have another arm where we call it responsive support where people can hire us or they can commission us and for certain projects we prefer to work in partnership we're not a traditional consultant we like to work in a more embedded way and will come in for very short moments of support. So we will do a workshop that shows people one method for working together. It's about providing that strategic support and then stepping away to allow people to do these processes by themselves. So we might be commissioned by, say, for example, a private practice, an architect's practice. Often increasingly, we're seeing local authorities in this space looking at, especially in London, there is a lot of regeneration happening. Local authorities are recognising that they don't necessarily have the expertise in-house and they're inviting us into these conversations to support them. So that's two prongs. That's about supporting the communities, but also about supporting the local authority and building expertise and skills within their teams as well. That work is commissioned. One of the challenges we come across is the shifting landscape I would say that the built environment, architecture, landscape architecture, planning etc as a whole in the last 15 to 20 years has become much more socially minded, much more community led. There's more space in those conversations but it's quite fickle. You know we have political cycles and we have different opinions in our places about how they should be designed and made and trying to navigate that as quite a small charity can be difficult. I mentioned earlier kind of the funding landscape I think particularly post-covid has been brutal it's been very very difficult for lots of people and because we're a national charity we're not based in one neighborhood or one area often funders don't know where to put us we fit into lots of different boxes and I would say that's probably in another of our challenges is the work that we do is it's quite niche in some ways to communicate that to people can be difficult because not everyone can understand where we're coming from or necessarily why we are in certain spaces but i think that's also one of our greatest strengths because we're a charity and we don't offer operate for profit we have a set of values that we align to and if we feel that a project corresponding to those values we've got a really strong basis to push for them actually stronger than if we were just commissioned or and we were a private organization it allows us to say, actually, as a charity, we think you should be doing this. And it kind of gives a little bit of power to our voice, which is fantastic.

SPEAKER_00: 23:11

There is an element of change that you're putting in place through the work you do. Is there change, something you can quantify? Is there change, something that is happening? It will happen. Is it happening fast or slowly?

SPEAKER_01: 23:24

This is a question we get quite a lot, actually, and something we butt up against as a small charity interested in collaborative development. own practices, is that a lot of the work that we do doesn't fit in quantitative boxes. It's really difficult to measure whether someone feels more connected to their local place. What does that mean as a number? What is that as a percentage? How do you measure that on a graph? Actually, the spaces that we operate in almost always gives qualitative data. So that's kind of harder to fit into the hard framework of funding or of kind of reporting and we often shout within our team about the need for the world to become less fixed on this quantitative data and i'm not i fully appreciate that there are spaces where it's really important and as our population keeps growing that's often the easiest way to represent large numbers of people's opinions but it's not representative of the human experience and i think we really need to push against this reduction of us all to numbers to percentages or to lines on a graph. In kind of some of our research, we have got the evaluation, the background to be able to say, yes, this is making a significant difference. The example I'll pull is one of our methodologies called cross-pollination. So we worked on this with the Open University and it's an approach to collaborative placemaking, a methodology of bringing people into a room and connecting the assets that they already have to cascade out new projects, new connections, and new places from that and we did a bit of when we were working with European University they did a set of mapping where we took two different groups and with one of them we did the cross-pollination workshop and with the other one we didn't and then they both went on a design journey and we mapped the connections that those people had and both before and after the workshops and the one after the workshop is insane and you can kind of see the it's the people that took part in that process have been able to connect with their community more to be more involved in local projects to create more local change so I'd say that's kind of the most quantitative that we get at certain points and a lot of our work is very long our chief executive Sophia always talks about sowing seeds we sow lots and lots of different seeds and I think particularly when we're working with young people we're you know sowing seeds all the time and some of them will will grow and they'll be beautiful. We have certain projects where we work with community group. The one that comes to mind is New Granville Homes, where we work with a community group there. And one of the residents called Angela still works with us as a community champion. So she was so engaged with that process that she's actually become a spokesperson for the local area. She shows other residents in different areas, undergoing region, what is possible. She comes and talks at our events as a community voice representation So that's a seed that's really bloomed amazingly. And then sometimes those seeds don't grow. You know, they'll stick in the ground, life in a lot of ways. And I think my background is in architectural practice, which is very outcome driven. At the end of the project, you will have a building or you will have a plate. More often than not, you'll have a planning application. And you have an outcome. And I think that shift from not all outcomes are tangible, a lot of them are intangible, has been interesting in it. It makes me value the different ebbs and flows of projects a little bit more within this role.

SPEAKER_00: 27:07

The question that I should have asked you and I haven't asked you, what is that question?

SPEAKER_01: 27:12

I think maybe not necessarily me, but a really interesting question to ask anyone as part of this podcast series is why do you work with young people? Why are you passionate about working with young people in the built environment? For me, I think there's an element of hopefulness in working with young people that they represent things that we wish were different when we were younger. I think also having gone through architectural education, I think education is amazing and has such power to change how people look at the world. And there's different lenses that you can give people, you know, a different set of glasses so that they can look at their street and think, oh, I've never thought about the way that the trees align on that street or how the fronts of the buildings make me feel more engaged. And I think there's something beautiful about inviting young people into that conversation and figuring out what it is about places that is important to them because it is it's so different to all of them I've had so many different conversations where sometimes it's just about a certain doorway they really love because it's associated with a certain memory or I spoke to a young girl from South London and it's a particular swan in a lake she loves that swan and that swan kind of reminds her of home and that's her connection to that place and I think often the built environment Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners, and please

SPEAKER_00: 28:52

subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and leave your rating and the Thank you very much. And please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.