Re-thinking the social in architecture is a major concern for architectural communities guided by global agendas e.g. UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The research project ‘(Im) Possible Instructions: Inscribing use-value in the architectural design process’ addresses the need for deeper analysis of design methodologies that include varied and site-bound practices to enhance citizen engagement. This practice-led research embeds Henri Lefebvre’s (impossible) aspiration that spaces are produced socially, as much through people’s desires to create and use them as within experts’ mainstream design processes. Drawing on emerging architectural-ethnographic ways of knowing, the project examines and demonstrates 1) how use-value has been inscribed into initial and ongoing architectural design processes of a post WWll large-scale housing estate; and how it is then enacted through inhabitants’ own creation of lived space; and from here 2) how use-value can be enhanced in new multi-perspective techniques of architectural instructions that value the relational and open-ended production of space.

Heidi’s research project is funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark International Postdoc Grant with Copenhagen University  & Newcastle University.