Co-Design Your Place: How to use Service Design in Regeneration

Co-design Your Place, originally named and known as Co-design your P(a)lace, emerged from the connectedness between young people who deeply believed that their knowledge, talents, skills and interdisciplinary collaboration enabled them to be agents of positive change. In 2017, the initial meeting of the group in student housing in London led to many fundamental questions, such as “what can we do together?” and “what if we could focus our energy on placemaking?”. The place was an essential background of the discussion, mainly because I was a representative of a new NGO founded to support the regeneration project of the Palace-Park Complex in Siemianowice Śląskie in Poland. When I showed pictures of the degraded, 17thcentury palace, we knew that it would have been a great revitalisation challenge. That was the kind of serendipitous moment when the right people meet at the right time. We were activists, young professionals or students of design courses, and most of us felt that together we could create the change we wanted to see in the future. As an interdisciplinary team with clarifying purpose, we were ready to work in a real environment, and we had a passion and a place willing to work with. Altogether, we accumulated the power to bring a new life to a meaningful, historical space in the heart of the Silesia region. That was the beginning of our collaboration, which has given us an excellent opportunity to experiment, engage in peer learning and cross-cultural exchange, practice service design methodology, and create a positive impact during the last three years.