VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

The deepening housing and energy crisis in the UK has huge impacts on access to decent housing and health conditions of millions of low-income people in the UK, with children, elderly people and people with underlying health conditions being the most heavily affected. Community benefit organisations such as Community Energy Birmingham provide consultancy and support to people who need energy upgrade in their homes. The lack of available funds and number of staff undermine the capacity and reach of these community benefit organisations. School of Architecture at Birmingham City University in Birmingham, UK has a long history of live projects that take place in collaboration between school and external stakeholders. These live projects not only provide students to confront and propose solutions for real lief problems of the city and its communities, but also provide access and participation to knowledge through co-production mechanisms for communities. This paper discusses the impacts of live projects (particularly with community organisations) on student learning experience through analysing one of the live projects that took place between Jan-May 2025 in collaboration with BSoAD and CEB. As a part of this collaboration, students produced a series of physical and visual artefacts to support community consultation events of CEB. The main idea was to make complex energy upgrade information (retrofit) more accessible by non-experts. The paper will also look at how the student work can contribute to the communication of complex energy efficiency information and make it more accessible for wider public analysing the community consultation events of CEB. The results will be used to revise and improve teaching methodologies and the potential artefacts for the next live project that will take place in Jan-May 2026.