Designers Accord Town Halls - Bristol and London

Hi All,

I’ve been looking into holding a London Town Hall meeting along with a fellow DA advocate in Bristol. We were thinking of holding them simultaniously to further extend the conversation and see how designers from these different communities view things.

We also thought it would be good to try and break away from the preaching-to-the-converted that often happens in sustainable design workshops and get some people along to push back or challenge the ideas that are disussed. Similarly, we thought it would be good to open the discussion up online first and see what the reaction is, which is what I’m doing here in part - so please join in!

Here are some thoughts to open the floor:

1 - Maybe we could have more regular, smaller scale meetings of DA members. These could be informal chats in a pub with members who are local to each other. Hopefully these would lead to ideas and suggestions that can be fed back into the DA from each one - could even do it live with Twitter. Topics for discussion could also be posted/twittered before each meeting so that there is some commonality in the ideas that come out of it.

2 - It would be good to get clients/suppliers/polluters/manufacturers/polititians involved since the brick walls are often put up at that level, making all the good thoughts from the designer redundant as bottom lines are used as an excuse not to push the boat out.

Please join in with your thoughts here, particularly if you are in London or Bristol!

This sounds great! A town hall in both Bristol and London in the same evening will help generate a buzz and it would be interesting to compare and contrast the ideas that arise at each.

I have a few ideas, maybe you can set up the format so that each town hall is working towards something like a 1 night project together but from two locations. Use the two cities as an advantage somehow. Does anyone have ideas for what can be done that way?
Can you invite those clients/manufacturers/politicians and ask them to bring in real life projects and have attendees brainstorm ways to approach the problems focusing on sustainable solutions and suggest ways to improve? That way attendees and clients can learn new ways (from each other) how to approach these problems.

Would anyone else be interested in planning a Town Hall on the same evening to generate a larger buzz? Do you think this Town Hall will happen in October?

I think anyone can chime in to this conversation to help brainstorm even if you aren’t from London & Bristol. It should be a larger conversation for how we can make an impact, especially when we come together as a group with many different disciplines, backgrounds and experience. Thanks for getting this going!