Learning from the use of media in community-led design projects

Community-led design is a practice whereby people take the opportunity to engage directly and creatively in the formulation of solutions for their own environment. In community-led design, professionals, stakeholders and communities come together to develop sustainable solutions to complex design and planning problems. Such projects can include the co-creation of public spaces, communal and public services, as well as processes and tools for citizen participation. Web 2.0 technologies and social media offer new opportunities for community-led design, potentially transforming the ways in which people take part in these processes and their ability to make an impact. This paper reports insights from the use of different types of media in community-led design projects and reflects on their role and their value for those involved, as well as for their wider communities.

Introduction 1 The Glass-House Community Design is an independent national charity in the UK, supporting and promoting public participation and leadership in the design of the built environment. They were one of a number of community partners on the 'Media, Creativity and the Creative Citizen' project.
Community-led design has a long-standing tradition relating to participatory design, collaborative design and co-design efforts developed primarily in the context of urban design, planning and architecture (for overviews see Blundell et al. 2005;Sanoff 2006). Such practices emerged in the '60s as part of the human rights movement, and a growing sense that people should have the right to participate directly in shaping the environments they live in.
Community-led design (CLD) can be defined as a process through which people are engaged in, and become responsible for, developing their environment, including buildings, open spaces, services and neighbourhoods. It encompasses a variety of practices, by different types of communities organised together for different purposes. For instance, while most community-led projects involve geographic communities engaged in place-making activities, people often come together due to a common interest or concern (e.g. health and wellbeing or political activism). There are also different ways in which communities assume leadership in design activities. While there are many cases where local groups initiate and take forward community projects from the bottom up, it is true that many projects are also instigated from the top down, such as big planning schemes by local authorities and developers.
Communities may therefore be involved in design activities as clients, as mediators (e.g. in neighbourhood planning) or as co-creators (perhaps in the ideal form of CLD). Involvement may also come at different phases or stages of the design process. Again, while the aim is meaningful engagement in decision-making throughout the design process, from visioning to implementation, CLD activities may materialise only at one particular stage (e.g. a community group may develop a vision but commission an expert architect to design a plan). Finally, CLD challenges traditional perceptions of design expertise, by recognizing the value of the community's local skills, knowledge and networks. In CLD, designers, architects and planners become creative facilitators of the design process, helping engage people, unearth needs and aspirations, manage conflicts, communicate design problems and solutions, mediate discussions and evaluate outputs and outcomes. CLD taps into professional and everyday creativity to create more inclusive and more sustainable solutions.
As a type of creative citizenship, community-led design shares many commonalities with other creative civic engagement and civil action projects, but it is unique in that it produces long-term effects in the environment. Community-led design leads to the creation of buildings, public spaces, parks and neighbourhoods thus having a lasting effect on people -they are public goods whose impact reaches more than simply those who live, work or play there. Community-led design therefore is a type of creative citizenship which possesses a strong element of place-making and a strong element of community leadership, operating within a civic space. The overall benefits of CLD include the creation of social value (e.g. civic participation, democratic outcomes, social capital and sense of community), personal value (personal expression, development of confidence and skills) and better quality of environments (Alexiou et al. 2013).
The starting point of this paper is the observation that civil society organisations and communities involved in CLD have been rapidly embracing new media in their practice.
New media bring both new technical possibilities (e.g. more user-friendly and accessible tools for 'making', 'sharing', and 'publishing'), and a more collaborative ethos (Bruns 2008) offering significant opportunities for citizen engagement and creative production (Harrison and Barthel 2009). However, despite the proliferation of social media, the landscape of media use in CLD remains largely unchartered, and the constraints and opportunities communities are faced with are not well understood.
The paper draws on three case studies in which the authors have been directly involved to reflect on how new forms of media are transforming CLD practice, and to discuss the constraints, the opportunities and the value generated.
Exploring the media landscape of community-led design There are many examples of social media being successfully used to create open shared resources for design actions (like the Open Architecture Network: an online, open-source community established in 2012 with the vision to improve living conditions throughout the world through innovative and sustainable design), or to mobilise people around planning issues (like the use of social media to report and rally people in the demonstrations in Taxim Square in Istanbul in 2013). Other types of media used in CLD include blogs used to report local news, events and achievements relating to a particular place, civil social networks created to showcase and connect community projects of many kinds with business, local government and civic groups (like Synathina, a platform for connecting civil action groups in Athens that was amongst the winners of Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayor's Challenge in 2014), digital storytelling tools, and tools for participatory mapping, and public consultation (like Mapping for Change and Stickyworld).
Since 2012, a series of interviews, focus groups and workshops have been held by the authors with over 20 community groups in Greater London, as well as with a number of professionals designing and maintaining such media, in order to understand prevalent use of different types of media and their associated challenges. Almost every single community group that took part reported using social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs or wikis) to share information and raise awareness and support for their projects, alongside project websites and traditional forms of communication and engagement. They also valued tools and processes for networking, peer-to-peer support and learning.
However, many groups found keeping up with the developments in technology difficult and faced significant challenges in updating media sites regularly to maintain a strong presence, as they rely on volunteers' time to run them. They also identified tensions relating to ownership, digital literacy and inclusivity.
It is impossible to understand the usage and potential of social media (or indeed any media) without reference to particular purposes, local factors and socio-demographic contexts. The next section presents three case studies that were carried out as part of three different collaborative research projects funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council in the UK (AHRC) in the period between 2012-2014.

Case studies
The case studies were set up as predominantly action research projects, and involved collaboration between academic and community partners. Each case study is discussed by providing the context, a description of the media and activities, and a consideration of their impact and benefits.

The online community plan for Wards Corner
Wards Corner Community Coalition (WCC) is a grassroots community group campaigning to save the market above Seven Sisters tube station in North London. The indoor market is home to a bustling multicultural community but has been threatened with demolition. The WCC has been active since 2007 and has fought a long legal battle against the plans of a developer for the area, which they view as threatening to displace the local community and businesses. In 2013, WCC proposed an alternative plan for the development of the overall site drawing on the aspirations of local people and seeking to enhance the local social and economic capital.
The Open University research team was introduced to the WCC through The Glass-House Community Led Design (a UK charity supporting and promoting public participation and leadership in the design of the built environment). The Glass-House had previously offered support in 2008 and 2011 to help the WCC develop their understanding of complex planning and regeneration issues, and to begin to create a shared vision for an alternative future for the space. Through a co-design process facilitated by the research team as part of the Creative Citizen project, WCC envisioned and designed a virtual tour of the community plan, using the Stickyworld platform 2 . This online engagement tool allows people to virtually step into the space, explore the current market and find out about the design proposals and principles. It also provides a forum where people can provide feedback and discuss details of the plan.
When WCC embarked on the virtual tour project they were already using social media quite successfully. They have a Facebook and Twitter account, as well as a Wikispaces site that provides information about the purpose of WCC, its activities and links to related documents. At the time the co-design process started, many of the members were somewhat demoralised as their legal battle had resulted in a negative outcome for them.
But to move their ideas for an alternative plan forward, they wanted to connect more with local people and to stimulate a meaningful dialogue around the future of the site.
The idea of the virtual tour provided a new frame of reference for the group, helping them to concentrate on the community plan and their engagement with local people. The Group has become a source of local knowledge for the entire community -both military and civilian families. One of the aims of Tidworth Mums was to integrate the two communities, and the Mums have championed this through their Facebook group and the various activities they run throughout the year. While the Tidworth Voices video was a catalyst for the creation of the group, the Facebook group was important for reaching far more people than they would be able to through traditional media.
The Facebook group has helped a lot of mums to have the confidence to actually come to the toddler groups and other activities through meeting someone online and coming along with those mums.
As  Feedback collected revealed that almost all students thought that as a result of the workshop they were able to look at things differently and appreciate their environment more, but also that they were more interested in media and would apply their skills in the future. They also reported having more confidence talking about place and a good understanding about how to use media to tell stories about place and voice their opinions.
I heard and watched many unusual things that I wouldn't normally think in depth about.
They have changed the way I feel, see, hear, smell and describe things. It revealed to me that everything has a design and detailed meaning.
The rain first brought the emotion of gloom but I then felt the rain on my skin and realised that each raindrop was a story. Each photograph captured these memories and in that created new memories.
I learned and noticed how places can intentionally and accidentally exclude or include people and groups.
The Glass-House team from their perspective thought that the use of media as a way to think about place added another layer of learning to their own design thinking and training.
Media can also be another way of just helping people to understand and explore some of those issues around place. It's an experiential relationship with place, rather than an analytical relationship.
I think that media can be a very powerful voice tool for young people in placemaking because there are a lot of young people, who won't want to step into a traditional public meeting but whose voice can actually have a huge impact on those meetings.
We changed our attitude towards and understanding of the value of those creative outputs/media, seeing their value as an artistic process and not just as an output in placemaking terms, as well as being a powerful empowering tool. ways. But there are also many similarities between the case studies. They all aim to use media to do more than simply broadcast or communicate something outwards: they aim to engage people in creative and meaningful activities. They all also look at engaging those considered to be ignored or excluded from traditional planning and place-making processes.
Media (and particularly social media) are an important part of the practice of groups and communities involved in place-making. The case studies show that media can be instrumental for achieving milestones these groups could not achieve before. However, it is important to recognise the effects of people's relationships with technology. Social media are becoming widely available and are a key aspect of everyday communication and social interaction of many people. This is a clue to their success (as is obvious in the Tidworth Mums case study). Nonetheless, this success also hinges on media literacy: both the ability of people to use or engage with certain technology or software, but also the ability of people to design and run these media outlets. The WCC understood that the innovative and highly visual consultation tool would attract, but also inevitably exclude certain people, and made an explicit effort to overcome this by holding 'surgeries' to take them through the process. Designing and running/updating the various media also requires a dedicated group of people with the relevant skills -Tidworth Mums have a distributed admin system and so do WCC. In Elephant & Castle, the media training was instrumental in helping students become confident and enthused about their place and their own contributions, while providing them with useful skills that they could apply in their personal and educational lives. Training in the use of media is important for the sustainability of projects, for allowing the activities and reach of these groups to scale up and for empowering people to a play meaningful role.
Finally, the case studies reinforce the observations from the interviews and focus groups that social media are part of a toolkit that groups use, and strategic integration with other forms of engagement, communication and action is important. The media landscape of community-led design combines social media and online presence with face-to-face meetings, small media (pamphlets, newsletters) and private online communications. The variety of outlets is necessary for reaching people which may otherwise be excluded.
Digital access is one parameter of exclusion -despite the fact that computers and Internet access are becoming cheaper, many individuals especially in deprived areas still can't afford them. But variety of outlets is important also for engaging with people from different age groups or with different abilities (for example visual communication often helps surpass language barriers) and for engaging people at different times and settings (at home or in the evening).
Successful media use in CLD requires not only a variety of outlets, but it also requires these outlets to be embedded in the particular context and purposes of each group. The case studies show that strategic thinking about the use and integration of media is instrumental in that respect. Both in the case of WCC and in the case of Tidworth Mums their involvement in a research project provided space for reflection and strategic planning of communications. The Tidworth Mums had a set of principles on how to run the Facebook group and what to share online already established, but where able to think strategically about how to use it as a vehicle alongside the research project to promote