Being Human: Elaine Cresswell

We speak to five landscape professionals, asking them what ‘human’ skill they best add to projects, where they see skills gaps and what they didn’t learn in their training – but now recognise as vital…

Elaine Cresswell is director of reShaped and specialises in sustainable people-centred design. She recently won the Landscape Institute Award for Communication and Presentation 2018 and is a member of Chester’s Design Review Panel.

I’d like to think the most human skills I bring are listening and respecting the community’s opinion as experts in their life, culture and neighbourhood. Empathy enables me to design a place that others will like and use.

When I’m visiting the site, I often bring a few bulbs to plant or my dog – they’re great conversation starters and encourage passers by to engage with me through their own curiosity. I always come away impressed by their perception, dedication to their neighbourhood and a clear idea of how to fulfil my client’s brief in a way that the community will be happy with.

Looking outside our profession to the way that artists and community land trusts are working, we need to be more imaginative about the way we engage people in landscape issues and our projects. Over the last six years, I’ve been involved with many community and artist-driven co-design sessions and environmental campaigns such as Bluegreen Liverpool, Zerocarbon Liverpool and the Thing on the Rec.

Without exception, the success of these projects has been due to creating a simple meaningful message; engaging with the public in a fun way that speaks to their individual and cultural experience; communicating the message in person through performance, staging, breath control and public speaking; broadcasting the message through social media, YouTube, podcasts and augmented reality apps; empowering the community to own the project and take it in the direction they want it to go and promoting the social, environmental and economic impact of the project.

Whilst it’s obvious that we’re not designing for ourselves, we’re all limited by our own lived experience and perceptions. We need to rely on ‘local experts’ more.

My lightbulb moment came during a mental health hospital startup meeting, when a service user spoke about the humanity of being able to open windows when you get hot or want fresh air. The need for people who are sectioned to have some element of control had never occurred to the design team and completely changed the environmental and safeguarding concepts throughout the design.