Residents Advisory Board 3

The third workshop with Barking and Dagenham's newly formed Residents' Advisory Board (RAB) took place on Wednesday 16 February. This week’s interactive and dynamic session, led by Alistair Bance, Stephanie Edwards and James Stewart from Urban Symbiotics, and Amandeep Singh Kalra and Betty Owoo from Be First, was all about co-creating the ideal home with the RAB. The session involved capacity building the RAB members on the design process, discussing and affirming priorities around the function of our homes, and finally commenting on and analysing flat layouts designed with insights collected from the RAB in mind.

The session kicked off with an overview into the design process of creating housing, led by Stephanie Edwards. Presenting the design process as an approach for breaking down a project into manageable chunks, Stephanie introduced the RAB to the numerous standards and regulations involved in delivering housing to ensure the quality and sustainability of our homes. She then took everyone through an example Be First floorplan to give an insight into how these considerations work in practice, showing how access, furniture placement, height, aspect, and amenity space are accounted for in the design of homes. She also discussed how the RAB Residents Charter would feed into the design process and have an impact on the design of housing, slotting in around the issuing of the design brief and beginning of concept design.

The RAB members then moved on to discuss the homework task for this session, which required them to find rental properties that would fit their needs for a set budget. A diverse range of properties were selected, but they all shared key characteristics around space provision, neutral colours and materials, and high amounts of natural light. It was interesting to note that these emerging priorities built on insights gathered in previous sessions – most important is space, neutral colours and materials, and natural light.

To finish up the session, we explored what a new layout for homes might looked like based on insights from the RAB. In breakout rooms, we showed the RAB four home layouts that were optimised for socialising, family life, flexibility and home working. These layouts corresponded to profiles created in response to their insights. Residents then commented on the spaces and inserted their adaptations to the layouts to show how they could work for them. By going through this interactive exercise, we were able to build our understanding of what an ideal home could look like to the RAB and residents in the borough. The key insight that came forward was that people valued flexibility and being able to adapt their homes to their changing needs.

Make sure to check back in with our news updates to follow the progress as we continue to work with the RAB to co-create a Residents’ Charter!