Design Future London - News and Updates

We are delighted to announce that we have been given the opportunity to host some student workshops at UK Construction Week. This is being hosted at the Excel conference and exhibition centre in the Royal Docks, London from Tuesday 3^rd to Thursday 5^th May 2022.

We will be hosting 2 workshops a day at the following times with a maximum capacity of 24 students for each session. Please note that these sessions are a repeat of those we did at London Build in November 2021 and are probably most suitable for those under 18.

We suggest about 2.5 hours for your students to explore the exhibitions and join the workshop activities with our design challenge team.

What is happening?

The workshop will take place at the Careers Centre and Workshop – this is a 1.5 hour activity themed around the challenges that we face building the cities of the future.

Your students will be welcome to join us to take part in a paper folding challenge.

Your students will be able to visit other conference stands (suggestions are included in the brochure available in the useful document section on the Portal) to learn about aspects of the built environment.

Your students will be able to join conference sessions where leading speakers in the built environment will be talking about relevant topics (you can review the conference programmes online and some suggestions are included in the brochure sent by email).

There are four exhibitions happening at once – your entry ticket gets you access to all areas – check out the programmes here:

UK Construction Week - https://www.ukconstructionweek.com/

Grand Designs Live - https://www.granddesignslive.com/

Concrete Expo - https://www.concreteexpo.co.uk/

Offsite Show - https://www.offsiteshow.com/

The Mayor of London's team and representatives from MOBIE will be available to talk about their careers with your students and answer any questions about how to enter/get involved in next year’s design challenge.

How to sign up?

In the first instance please sign up on our Eventbrite.

Registration for you and your students:

• Please note that the workshop session with the design challenge team needs pre-registration with the Mayor of London (through this invitation - the design challenge team will then contact you with further instructions). Only 24 spaces are available to students per session. There are 2 sessions a day on each of the three days of the exhibition. You can reserve space for you and/or your group on the Eventbrite link.
• The conference organisers require 1 teacher per 10 student attendees for supervision. As teachers, aswell as registering through Eventbrite, you will also need to register with UK Construction Week (link above). The design challenge team will be in touch with you to get your students registered. We will send you a spreadsheet to fill in the names of your students. Full instructions will follow.

We look forward to welcoming you! Any questions - please email DesignChallenge@london.gov.uk

Kind regards

The Design Challenge Team

Ever wanted to know what we get up to and who creates new places in London?

We will be showcasing some of the exciting careers available in this industry!

We will be publishing some articles around different careers in the built environment over the coming weeks.

To kick us off …

What about town planning?

This video explains a little more about what we as town planners are responsible for and get involved in.

The Royal Town Planning Institute have lots of useful resources on getting involved in planning. Their Planning your world website explains what planners can change and also gives some helpful biographies of colleagues in the industry.

Read: Meet the Planners / Planning Your World

As a town planner you can work in the private sector (as a planning agent or for a developer for instance) or you work in the public sector (deciding on planning applications for development or creating planning policy to shape that development). We will return to this profession more over coming weeks to give you more information on what salaries you can expect and some more experiences of planners working in the industry.

Hear from Jules Pipe CBE, Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills. This short video is from an event in September where Jules was invited to speak to students like you about his role and how we should be thinking about cities now and for their future challenges.

Any questions you want answered can be emailed to us at DesignChallenge@london.gov.uk

Whether you are working in a group or entering individually, everyone entering the challenge should fill in the form.

If you have any difficulty with this – please get in touch and we will help. DesignChallenge@london.gov.uk

There are terms and conditions of entry set out on our PORTAL – check out the useful documents section. This is now updated as we are accepting entries from higher education/university students from further afield – you can now enter from across the UK.

Link to online form

MATT+FIONA – Master planning Crash Course at London Build – 18 November 2021

So that everyone could benefit from our live session on design and master planning we recorded the session with MATT+FIONA that we held at the London Build conference at London’s Olympia on 18 November 2021. Extra resources are available in the Useful Documents section of the Portal (on the right hand side of the page).

Sign up for Digital licences – FREE TO ALL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

All the information on the free software licences for ArcGIS and SketchUp is available on the TOOLBELT section – how to do Digital. If you are attending the webinars training – make sure you have a free licence beforehand.

If you are doing the challenge as part of your school class – your teacher will have organised the IT / licences for you so no need to worry!

Free webinars on master planning and design - Catch up now on You Tube

All the information on the free software licences for ArcGIS and SketchUp is available on the TOOLBELT section – how to do Digital. If you are attending the webinars training – make sure you have a free licence beforehand.

If you are doing the challenge as part of your school class – your teacher will have organised the IT / licences for you so no need to worry!

Free webinars on master planning and design - Catch up now on You Tube

We are holding free webinars for teachers and students to learn more about master planning and how to build 3D models in the programme SketchUp.

All of the webinars are recorded so are on our YouTube channel for the challenge. There are lots of sessions left and all are welcome – sign up on our Eventbrite page and we will make sure you get the link.

The next webinar is on Wednesday 2 February 2022 so sign up now.

All of the slides from the webinars can be accessed in the Useful Documents section on the Portal.

Teachers and students … we hope you are enjoying the design challenge. We are planning to give you updates along your design challenge journey with us.

We hope you learn lots about the built environment professions and the opportunity the industry offers to young people like yourselves. Most of all we hope you have fun doing the challenge and we are really excited about seeing your entries.

Have you watched all of the welcome videos?

We have a You Tube channel where we add useful videos.

There is a welcome video from the Mayor of London and George Clarke, Architect and TV presenter who will be judging your entries to the challenge!

Hear about student experiences from other design challenges hosted by George Clarke’s charitable organisation MOBIE. In this video, previous winners explain what they have benefit they have taken from taking part.

This video introduces you to the site(s) that you have to pick from. It also introduces you to the Royal Docks as an area of East London.

Your toolbelt has a range of other resources to look at – including factsheets and video. These are based around the four themes of the challenge. One of the most important themes to this challenge is making places. This video explains why places are so important to Londoners and what we should be thinking about when designing those places for the future.

We are happy to answer any of your questions - email us at DesignChallenge@london.gov.uk