Planit-IE expands with community engagement specialists
Planit-IE has brought the team behind design studio Oh Ok in house, creating a new division named Standard Practice which will focus on creatively engaging communities and place activation.
The directors of Oh Ok, Joe Hartley, Jess Higham and Ben Young, have now joined Planit-IE as full-time staff. The team have worked on placemaking projects such as Noma, where they were behind the design and delivery of The Pilcrow pub, which saw 200 volunteers help to build it.
Standard Practice’s focus is on bringing people in to public realm, engaging with spaces through workshops, performances, parties and artistic residences, and delivering early-stage community consultations in an open and accessible way.
Ben Young, creative principal, said: “Joe, Jess and I have been working alongside Planit-IE since our founding. We share common values, goals and a love of honest community engagement. What we do should be standard practice for anyone working within new and changing communities. When a new place is designed, beautiful CGIs are populated with communities of people that simply don’t exist yet; too often there is no clear plan to ensure that the drawings develop into the thriving and well performing communities that they depict. This is the job of Standard Practice.”
Lindsay Humblet, design director of Planit-IE, said: “At Planit-IE we strive to conceive, design and deliver intelligent, people-centred environments. The Standard Practice team are expert in ensuring that these places are activated and adopted by their communities and remain exciting, collaborative and critically engaging beyond completion dates.
“We have worked with the Standard Practice team for a few years now and welcoming them into the Planit-IE family represents a fantastic statement of intent for our twentieth year in business – we refuse to rest on our laurels.”
What on earth is that photo supposed to convey? I suppose to the young and hip nothing says “honest community engagement” like a group of people wearing identical trainers and eating cereal…
By Dennis Nails
And the petrol thingy?
By Anonymous
“bringing people in to public realm, engaging with spaces through workshops, performances, parties and artistic residences”
Heaven forbid that anyone should be naturally brought into public realm by its usefulness, good design and – oh ok perhaps contraversially – maybe even peacefulness.
If a places don’t live up to their CGIs then perhaps the solution is to produce more realistic CGIs? As opposed to imposing meaningless “animation” events on a place.
Standard practice for developers should be to learn from mistakes, including adopting a more mature, inclusive (as opposed to any idea of “inclusive” where non CGI people are oddities) and open minded view of “place”.
By Mike
Dennis – here’s my guess, that they all buy their shoes from the same place!
By BDAY
Picture looks like a quirky dance 3-piece from Hornchurch.
By Terry