Insight
Elevating Design
7 Dec 2023
David Shaw
National Design Director
At the heart of Pick Everard resides the commitment to break the mould, to positively influence the built environment with sustainable, innovative, and exceptional design. National Design Director, David Shaw discusses how we have adopted a Design Quality Plan across our Design Services to focus our attention to important focus areas.
Design Culture
To support the Design Quality Plan we have established a Design Forum to promote and enrich a design culture underlining our holistic and interdisciplinary methodologies, enhancing our collaborative culture.
Our agenda is to deliver projects with passion and creativity, combining skill and knowledge to develop optimal design outcomes through engagement and collaboration. Initiatives like our Design Forum support this ethos. This approach brings creativity to the forefront, providing everyone with the opportunity to be imaginative and contribute to a culture of design, pushing our limits, challenging our creativity, and enriching our knowledge.
Design Competitions
Design competitions are important because they allow us to select key areas where we want to focus our creative talents, as well as allowing us to be collaborative in our multi-disciplinary environment. It’s super important for our team to contribute to the design process promoting exploration of concept.
We also select competitions that have the potential to be transformational for communities, improving wellbeing and creating environments that improve our daily experience.
This is something we are hugely passionate about as we work towards numerous social value outcomes including levelling up goals, general improved wellbeing, sustainability initiatives and local economic spend.
Sustainability in mind
Sustainability and the journey to net zero carbon is significant to the business and we benefit from the skills and knowledge of our sustainability and energy team.
A central tenet to our design services approach is how we can reuse and retrofit – utilising design interventions to achieve EnerPHit and reducing embodied carbon through repurposing the existing fabric.
We believe in repurposing to breathe vitality into our cities and towns. There are opportunities to imaginatively adopt these lost environments which can present many advantages for our communities.
For example, we recently entered a RIBA Journal competition that reimagined department stores as education environments. This was a design competition that resonated with our aspirations and really questioned our choices around regeneration, and how we can breathe life back into redundant properties in the high street whilst challenging education pedagogy. Department store buildings are not unusable, but we must think creatively and collaboratively to rethink their role for future generations.
So, what does this all mean?
For Pick Everard, we want to promote our team to imagine, explore and create to ultimately deliver better together for our clients. Overall demonstrate our passion and pride in the work we do and the ongoing hunger to challenge ourselves. Our commitment to repurposing and retrofitting for a sustainable future illustrates our dedication to leaving a lasting, positive impact on both the environment and the communities we serve.