[LiU design] Invitation to design seminar with Steve Threlfall

[Johan Blomkvist]

Hello everyone!

On Tue 28 of January at 13.15 in the B-house design studio<https://www.ida.liu.se/department/location/search.en.shtml?keyword=Designstudio> Steve Threlfall from the Manchester School of Art will give a seminar on his work with engaging communities to re-activate places and spaces.

Here's a short introduction about Steve, and further down a short overview of the projects he wants to discuss with us:
'A graduate in architecture, I have been working as a designer since the mid-nineties. Early on I my career I saw the considerable value of socially engaged practice.  Speaking to stakeholders whose voices were otherwise unheard was clearly a means to gather deeper intelligence which could make a space or organisation function more effectively.  Proven by results, I've always seen approach as a route (not a barrier) to innovation. In 2014, myself and a group of like-minded friends co-founded We Make Places CIC, a social enterprise established to engage communities in the re-activation of places and spaces in their neighbourhoods. I split my working time between practice and my role as part time Senior Lecturer in Interior Design at Manchester School of Art.'

These are the projects we will talk about:

  1.  City College RUG room

A learning space created through co-design for and by young learners with Aspergers. Created in 2008, this demonstrates my earlier engaged practice as a spatial/interior designer. Co-design has been central to my practice a long time in advance of the formation of We Make Places and this projects and its outcomes best demonstrates this.

  1.  The Flyover

This project, a proposal to  transform a potentially condemned elevated road into a citizen-led park gained much traction in social media an crowd-funding. We Make Places closed the highway and activated it with cultural events on 7 occasions. The structure was demolished by the city in late 2019. We Make Places and Urban Workbench are legacies of this idea, so it lives on thanks to the thinking that emerged from it.

  1.  Contrachapado con alma (Plywood with Soul)

Funded by the European Cultural Foundation, this residency in Madrid in 2017 formed a pilot for the processes of co-design through digital manufacture. 2 projects, the first with young people new to the city and the second, with a neighbourhood organisation resident in a former fruit market, each presented the opportunity for citizens to co-produce ideas of manufacture from a single sheet of plywood.

  1.  Urban Workbench satellite projects (social housing)

We are working as advocates with 2 communities each within social housing estates in the North West of England. We have created joinery workshops at each location as a tool for dialogue (based around the proposed 'regeneration' of their estates) whilst increasing capacity and self-confidence. These projects focus on improving collective capacity for placemaking and stewardship against a backdrop of governmental opposition to social housing. In the case of one of these projects, new homes of various tenure are being introduced in order to fund improvements, therefore lessons from the dangers of 'gentrification' are vital.

Welcome!
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