Description
DWELL is a workshop like no other about the future of housing and the future of workplaces and cities. Along the way you can have a good look at re-building society, considering employability, supporting young people and increasing equality in early careers. It links to PSHE, Citizenship, Careers, The Future of Work and Sociology…most of all, it’ll make your students THINK about inequality and empower them to feel they can DO something about it.
This is the workshop pack so that you can deliver the DWELL workshop yourselves, either with our support or not, virtually or face-to-face. The materials will be emailed as PDF documents with a link to an explanatory video exploring how to set up the sessions and what to use at which points.
Pack contents: DWELL Manifesto including research and ideas; DWELL sample business plans and tenant diaries; visualisation of DWELL building; blueprint outline for design development; business plan template; link to BBC documentary on PDRs and commercial to housing development; PowerPoint presentation; Explanatory teacher video and student inspiration / introduction film.
Why DWELL, why now?
Why will we be doing this? For the past few years, business has been changing, the internet has changed commerce, house prices have changed cities, workplaces have changed and contracts have become weaker and favour the employer more often than the employee.
Since the world has been changed through the COVID-19 pandemic and many office-based and retail, entertainment and hospitality workplaces have remained closed or on skeleton staff there has been a revolution in how we work – working from home, flexibly, balancing caring responsibilities with employment, travelling less, using technology more and public transport (as well as cars) less. This has changed companies in many ways.
- 2/3rds of employees want to work from home and 36% of employees would take the ability to work from home over a pay rise.1
- Nearly six out of ten employers save significant sums through having a home-based workforce[1].
- The average company saves $10,000 per year per employee who works from home.1
- Two-thirds of employers say employees are more productive when working from home and organisations such as BT found that employees are 35-40% more productive.1
According to the above research it would seem sensible to make sure people were furnished with the equipment and infrastructure (laptops, mobile phones, superfast broadband) to enable them to work from home wouldn’t it?
Also in the UK, we have a housing crisis, lack of social housing, unaffordable rents, absentee landlords buying properties off plan as an investment means that many city centres are empty but still growing in value…while people can’t afford rents and the average house in the UK takes a year’s salary to put down a deposit on to purchase…so a generation is unable to get on the ‘property ladder’ because rental costs preclude savings.
So what’s the solution? Your students may just be the solution – and along the way they will develop teamwork skills, an awareness of careers and jobs in housing and urban planning and gain a better understanding of the future choices they may have.
“You cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” Albert Einstein.
NB: photo below blurred to protect content.
[1]https://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/resources/costs-benefits
