You've heard of co-design and of course, community engagement, but what about participatory building? That's when people are invited on site to help build, fostering teamwork, imparting skills and empowering a neighbourhood. Working in collaboration with charity Global Generation, Dr Jan Kattein has been building community spaces with volunteers aged 6 to 76 on site – and redefining the role of the architect in shaping places.

On these sites, the process – not the final project – is the core purpose. That's a different kind of design challenge. And these are no ordinary construction sites – Global Generation has a mission to connect youth with nature, so they have used traditional techniques with natural materials such as cordwood, and volunteers have been busy making bricks, shakes and rammed earth walls, while youth apprentices have also been training on site.

“For two years, we’ve been making bricks out of clay… we’ve been making wooden shakes out of Sweet Chestnut… we’ve been building with earth…” says Kattein. “It’s a very inclusive process. All ages can participate,” says Kattein.

Kattein talks about the shifting role of the architect in participatory processes, the need to reduce carbon and embrace natural materials and the transformative power of construction: The moment when a child drags their parent to a building and says, "Mum, I helped build that part of the wall."

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Get on a crowded train, and your brain may not like it. With strangers around you, cortisol levels shoot up to prepare you for fight or flight, stimulating the liver to produce and release glucose into your blood stream, just in case. Unless you run screaming from the train, your blood sugar levels won’t go down for a few hours – just in time for you to take the train again.

“You’re dosing yourself with almost pure glucose twice a day for your working life,” says Nick Tyler, a professor who investigates the ways in which people interact with the built environment. Tyler believes we need to design the built environment not solely for the conscious mind, but for brain and the body impacts taking place out of sight. As Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering, Tyler works with a transdisciplinary team to study what that means for design – collaborating with psychologists, neuroscientists, architects and others to research the health and safety impacts of the built environment.

Learn about his immense laboratory in East London, PEARL, and his large-scale experiments with bus stops, zebra crossings, urban parks, supermarkets and e-scooters that have revealed safety gaps and failings.

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Wait five minutes and someone will tell you the latest thing they’ve outsourced to AI; How it’s taking minutes of meetings or summarising reports they haven’t read. If you point out that the work of AI isn't exceptional, they say 'Just wait, it will get smarter'. But will it?

According to Professor Jutta Treviranus, director and founder of the Inclusive Design Research Centre in Toronto, the answer is, well, concerning: Unless we do something fundamental about how it works, the output of AI will continue to be just average. 

“When we’re using statistical replicators, they are making decisions based on statistics, so they look for the statistical average and use predictive analytics to decide the best thing to do.” 

Of all the possible dystopian predictions, the fact that AI tends towards the typical, standard and normative doesn’t sound so bad – except that when applied to systems including the built environment, it’s dangerous. 

“What people don’t seem to recognise is that for people who are outliers, the systems will always decide against them.” And who is an outlier? All of us at some point.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.