TAKING BACK OWNERSHIP - To utilise the empty spaces and units on the high street with a place to celebrate the local institutions work. A space to help build a stronger connection within the community, creating a sense of fulfilment with the people of Dudley.
Stepping Stone 4 adds layers to the High Street. Like the other visions, we wanted to use CoLab Dudley’s principles ‘use nature as a guidebook’ and ‘create conditions for curiosity and experimentation’. The main way we proposed to do this was adding a green canopy to provide shelter, create a hybrid indoor outdoor space welcoming to families and a more communal open space, and support ecosystems.
Our collective vision for Dudley is to support a creative community that is connected through our internet of things; creating spaces that allow for the collection and redistribution of materials that locals can use to construct products with. Community engagement is central to this design network with local businesses encouraged to get involved in manufacturing.
We decided to bring alive this vision through a series of pavilions positioned through the High Street, following a process through recycling, storing constructing and manufacturing. To take this idea further, we allocated several empty units along the High Street to become spaces involved in the open factory, from workshops, educational centres and co-working hubs. Since we wanted to show the journey people would be able to take, we decided to create a storyboard for our final visual.
These visuals show how the pavilions could sit in the High Street, starting at the market place, past CoLab Dudley’s base, and ending up at Top Church. We wanted to show how people would be able to interact with these different spaces and navigate between them.
These are stepping stones that we wanted to achieve, with a scale of intervention, starting with small changes that could still have a big impact e.g. street furniture. At the other end of the scale is topography, where larger adaptations can be made for what we want to achieve.