Meeting with Milton Keynes Council
Yesterday (Thursday 8th September) I had a meeting with Andrew Armes, head of design and development at Milton Keynes council, to discuss filming design meetings. He heads a department of 65 people with around 20 architects as well as urban planners, and landscape architects.
He was positive about the idea of filming (I had expected that I would have to do a bit more explanation) and thought external observation generally a good thing. He told me about a number of projects going on - from individual schools to urban regeneration programmes and offered a number of different types of meeting to attend.
In the short term would be a large creative meeting, facilitated by Oxford Brookes university, discussing the development of an area of road into a 'boulevard'. This sounded like a large project, although interesting. Other projects seemed better suited to our purposes. He told me about an office 'happy hour', during which architects would discuss each others schemes they were working on. This had lapsed, however, due to increased workload. There was also what he termed 'the voluntary sector', which I understood was a sort of local consultation that were meeting once a month to discuss how to change a 'civic centre' into a 'community hub'.
So a few different options. My preference would be to try and sit-in at a happy hour, and then try and follow up a design somehow once communication and trust had been established.
We agreed to keep in touch, and I asked him to keep me in mind should any meetings come up that he thought suitable. We agreed a strategy of sitting in and observing first, and filming only when comfortable. I told him I'd get back to him about attending the creative workshop as I couldn't myself attend, but maybe someone else from the project team might be able to do so.
In summary, an interesting contact, and potential I think.
He was positive about the idea of filming (I had expected that I would have to do a bit more explanation) and thought external observation generally a good thing. He told me about a number of projects going on - from individual schools to urban regeneration programmes and offered a number of different types of meeting to attend.
In the short term would be a large creative meeting, facilitated by Oxford Brookes university, discussing the development of an area of road into a 'boulevard'. This sounded like a large project, although interesting. Other projects seemed better suited to our purposes. He told me about an office 'happy hour', during which architects would discuss each others schemes they were working on. This had lapsed, however, due to increased workload. There was also what he termed 'the voluntary sector', which I understood was a sort of local consultation that were meeting once a month to discuss how to change a 'civic centre' into a 'community hub'.
So a few different options. My preference would be to try and sit-in at a happy hour, and then try and follow up a design somehow once communication and trust had been established.
We agreed to keep in touch, and I asked him to keep me in mind should any meetings come up that he thought suitable. We agreed a strategy of sitting in and observing first, and filming only when comfortable. I told him I'd get back to him about attending the creative workshop as I couldn't myself attend, but maybe someone else from the project team might be able to do so.
In summary, an interesting contact, and potential I think.
posted by Peter Lloyd at 9:16 AM
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