Resources

2023 - UK Architects Declare 'Design Conversations: Talking through your declaration challenges'

Meeting the design challenges of the Planetary Emergency is a journey - and making your declaration is only the start. Each signatory practice needs to govern its own progress toward achieving its commitments, and AD has have developed ‘Design Conversations’ to help. These short, informal sessions of focused and confidential discussions offer an additional layer of support to our signatories, and help AD better understand the barriers to delivering on the declaration.

A Design Conversation session is usually via Zoom or Teams, lasts up to 2 hours and remains in confidence between your team and our small panel of Steering Group members. Design Conversations are free and unfunded, so we're looking to offer a handful of sessions in 2023 as we explore and develop our process.

If you would like to find out more and how this might help your practice, contact us: [email protected]

2022 - UK Architects Declare 'Practice Action Masterclass' videos

In 2022, UK Architects Declare held a series of masterclasses on key topics in our Practice Guide (2021), as part of our Practice Action collaboration with ACAN and in partnership with the RIBA. We launched this with a special online event in April to share expert guidance and participants' experiences on using the principles in our Practice Guide to build more sustainable and regenerative projects and practices. This video has all the presentations and Q&A discussion - as well as the launch of AD's Practice Guide Masterclasses series, developed jointly with ACAN and in partnership with the RIBA.

Designing your own Practice Roadmap event video

Our workshops then ran from May to September. The 5 workshops brought together a wide range of experts for presentations and Q&A with participants around key topics in implementing the Practice Guide. The videos last from 40 to 70 minutes approximately.

Masterclass 1: Climate Literacy (May 2022). This workshop helped participants to assess existing levels of climate literacy against the Climate Framework – an industry-recognised tier system for climate literacy.
Masterclass 2: Understanding Impact (June 2022). This workshop helped practitioners to measure and reduce their impact by developing an understanding of the relative impact of project and business carbon footprints, reporting against scope 1-3 emissions, and carrying out early-stage life cycle assessments.
Masterclass 3: Working with the Client (July 2022). This workshop helped participants to explore how to: work with clients to develop a project brief that achieves sustainable or regenerative outcomes; challenge weaknesses in the brief; overcome typical barriers during the development and delivery process; develop in-house office champions; galvanise support within the design team; develop a compelling business case demonstrating clear value to the client.
Masterclass 4: Collaboration & Learning within Practice (August 2022). This workshop helped practices to foster a culture of collaboration and learning: how to grow climate literacy and share expertise, galvanise action within design teams and draw on what is successful already.
Masterclass 5: Closing the Loop (September 2022). Including case studies of Post Occupancy Evaluation, this workshop helped participants to: develop a successful feedback loop looking at types of building evaluation; to engage other members of the team with the process; gain an understanding of how clients and practice benefit from such appraisals.

We ended the series in December with a special event with ACAN, in London, Edinburgh and online. You can watch the ‘Practice Action - Assembly!’ video, with videos from ACAN’s Conversation series complementing our Masterclasses, on ACAN’s YouTube channel.

You can read more about the series in this short guide: UK Architects Declare - Guide to the Practice Action Masterclasses - which includes a link to the template Miro Boards we developed. During the workshops, participants used these to share ideas and their practices’ progress on the topics.

2022 - UK Architects Declare 'Building Justice: Crisis Solutions' video

On 3rd November 2022, we held a special in-person event (with livestream option) on climate justice as a key aspect of the planetary emergency resulting from the failing systems that govern our built environment and economies. This event - kindly hosted by Levitt Bernstein in their London offices - took place ahead of the COP27 global talks, and as households, businesses, communities and professions seek to navigate the ongoing energy crisis. We had an excellent panel of speakers and you can watch all the talks and discussions in our video, which is just over 90 minutes.

Building Justice: Crisis Solutions event video

2021 - UK Architects Declare 'Practice Guide'

Architects Declare has developed this Practice Guide to help signatories convert their declaration into meaningful action and build momentum within their practice. Part 1 is a Practice Roadmap that provides 5 simple steps to transform your business. Part 2 is the Project Design Guide, focused on the fundamentals of truly sustainable design and demonstrated through exemplars. It is intended to be a live, working document that helps fulfill the fourth point in our 12-point declaration by encouraging the sharing of knowledge and research on an open-source basis.

There is also a short form here for signatories to give their feedback on the document and for anyone who would like to help develop further versions of the document to register their interest.

We held a special online event in November 2021 to introduce the Practice Guide, featuring a 'walkthrough' of the Guide and a short Q&A session:

2021 - UK Architects Declare 'Ideas Into Action' videos

In April 2021, our Ideas Into Action online two-day conference brought a close focus to both bold ideas (Day 1: a series of inspiring talks from Roman Krznaric, Dr Gabrielle Walker, Farhana Yamin & Jojo Mehta, interspersed with break-out sessions) and to practical actions to translate these into reality (Day 2: with three short talks from companies: Expedition, Interface and British Land - who have all undergone transformative change, sharing some of the successes and challenges in how they have risen to the planetary emergency - and series of PechaKucha style presentations about emerging and provocative ideas. We also launched our Strategy for Change, and you can see all the plenary sessions here.

2020 - UK Architects Declare 'Embodied Carbon Workshop' presentations

In March 2020, we held a one-day at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios in London, with 12 expert presentations on embodied carbon.

2019 - UK Architects Declare 'Battersea Conference' videos

In November 2019, our conference at the Battersea Arts Centre in London brought together architects and engineers for inspiring talks by our special guest, Jeremy Lent and Kate Raworth.