Enabling: A Critical Approach to Transformative Community-Led Design

This thesis was completed as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Award under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Connected Communities programme between the University of Sheffield and U.K. charity The Glass-House Community-Led Design (TGH). Situated within place-based participatory practices, community-led design, an approach advocated by TGH, has not been explored to a significant degree in academia. Similarly, the practice of enabling participatory built environment design is inherently associated with the concept of empowerment; however, little research has focused on the phenomenon of ‘design-enabling’ in this context.
What is needed for collective actors to take the lead in developing their design projects? These actors need to embrace design knowledge and group dynamics, but how do the community participants gain the capacity to understand the complex issues of a design project? Moreover, what does this mean for a designer, and how can designers support collective actors in unearthing and enhancing their agency and empowerment?

The research focused on interviews and discourses surrounding community-led design, alongside observations and feedback from four TGH design training workshops. The data revealed conditions, actions, and consequences of the phenomenon of ‘design-enabling’. By critically examining the findings in the context of the literature on transformation, empowerment, and critical pedagogies, the need for design enablers to adopt different types of supporting roles (educator, community champion, activist, broker, and mediator) to empower diverse and different community groups within a range of design project settings emerged. By gaining a wider understanding of transformative civic pedagogies and the different levels of empowerment that come with them, enablers can create more resilient participatory approaches, enhancing and expanding a community's contributions to the design process.