The Sheffield Design Lab took place in November 2025, as part of Future Observatory and Dark Matter Labs’ UK 2040 programme. The lab explored how a situated design studio-like process might shed light on these often abstract yet transformational challenges facing the UK, the volatility induced by ecological breakdown, institutional fragility, civic distrust, diminishing public health and extractive economies. As design helps transform societal ideas into things and experiences, and settings to encounter those ideas, taking a place-based strategic design approach might help with the reverse, revealing the complexity and richness of broader challenges embedded in the infrastructures of everyday life in places like Sheffield. This would allow Future Observatory to refine its emerging research agenda whilst offering meaningful insights to Sheffield along the way.
“Identify a set of open strategic questions that might inform meaningful research agendas for Sheffield and places like it”
The goal was not to devise a strategy for Sheffield in three days, for obvious reasons. Instead, it was to work with Sheffield in order to identify a set of open strategic questions that might inform meaningful research agendas for Sheffield and places like it. Sheffield would be a lens with which to view various possible futures for the UK, a role it has often served in the past, frequently seen as a ‘city of the future’. Holding off the tendency to grasp the quick answers deceptively lying around, a harder focus on questions would form a more generative approach.
Questions expand civic options, and create space for possible futures. Questions are not an idle pursuit—they ultimately help form better briefs, strategies, networks.
About the process
After discussing potential themes with Sheffield City Council, I worked with the Future Observatory team and Indy Johar (Dark Matter Labs) to design a modified version of the strategic design studio process created by the Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA’s Helsinki Design Lab, which both myself and Indy had participated in. Iterated upon many times since, the studio process typically involves a core team tackling a ‘big picture’ strategic challenge over the course of a week, moving from expert presentations and forms of fieldwork through to synthesis sessions, before presenting findings and strategic trajectories to a group of local stakeholders. This Sheffield Design Lab version was shortened—three days rather than five, and with three months’ set-up rather than a year—and oriented around the practice of designing questions rather than the actionable trajectories and themes located in the Helsinki format.
The Future Observatory team and I used Site Gallery’s studio space as the base for the week, and together we curated a set of participants and places that the core team could meaningfully encounter and work with over the three days of the studio. The team designed a workbook for participants with which to outline the week’s events, as well as hold notes and emerging questions. Days one and two largely involved presentations and discussions, both in-studio and in the city, forming a set of inputs for the team, and slowly moving the discussions from national to local experiences. For the third day, the core team worked these diverse inputs into a draft set of strategic questions, before presenting to a Sheffield stakeholder group to close the studio.
The week’s events
DAY ONE was designed as an intense series of ‘downloads’ of insights and perspectives, from projects, practices and places inside and outside of Sheffield. The morning included Jonathan Smales joining from Glasgow to share insights about the groundbreaking Phoenix development in Lewes, followed by strategic scene-setting from Sheffield City Council’s Jonathan Clifton. The National Retrofit Hub’s Sara Edmonds spoke to the retrofit revolution required across the UK, whilst Sheffield University’s Megan Blake described the dynamics of community food and agriculture systems.
The afternoon continued with University College London’s Josh Ryan Collins joining from London to outline the realities of the UK’s housing economy, particularly regarding sustainability and equity issues created by financialised housing sectors. Conversely, Frances Northrop spoke to the potential of local community wealth-building projects. Malmö’s City Architect Finn Williams joined online from Sweden to bring a perspective from another northern industrial city reorienting itself around more sustainable and equitable futures via a diverse set of inspiring initiatives. Finally, the team met with James O’Hara to discuss Sheffield’s evolving pub and club scene, as well as other aspects of the cultural sector that he and his partners have been building.
DAY TWO started with a visit to Alex Maxwell at La Biblioteka bookshop, to discuss the realities of building successful local independent cultural businesses and a ‘new industrial legacy’, before meeting Charlotte Thompson to hear about the rich potential of Sheffield Innovation Spine. Sheffield University’s Nigel Dunnett then walked the team from the city centre up to the retrofitted Park Hill housing estate and then down along the transformational landscape-led regeneration systems of Grey to Green past the increasing ‘day-lighted’ rivers that shape Sheffield. Back in the studio, the team heard Kerry Campbell (Bradford City of Culture) and Katie Matthews (GUT Level) outline the dynamics of the city’s cultural scene, alongside those of other UK towns and cities, before Paul Chatterton (Leeds University) continued the theme of learning from elsewhere, describing his participative urban development projects taking root in Leeds. The team then heard from Claire Thornley of Eleven Design on the communication of Sheffield’s evolving identity, and from James Lock of Opus on the highly innovative City Goals.
DAY THREE started with the group listening to a recorded interview with John Thackara, describing how to find meaningful starting points for what he calls ‘designing for life’. Finally, the team built a wall of collective shared notes from all sessions before spending the remaining hours preparing the draft set of 20 questions for the stakeholder group presentation. These questions included: What’s the weather like in 2040? What does a 2040 civic workforce look like? How do we house Sheffield without building new houses?
The questions that emerged from the studio were no more than the tip of the iceberg of discussions and ideas generated over the week, and over the weeks that have followed the Design Lab too. They feel incomplete, open, and drafty, as might be expected. Yet each has within it entire bodies of potential research, starting points for pilot projects, place-based prototypes and civic experiments. Each sidesteps short-term solutionism and locates itself outside current strategies and policies for cities like Sheffield. Questions invite us to imagine beyond the present, to legitimise the not-yet-known. Each question attempts to expand the space for options, and to suggest a grounded entry point into the city—a person, project, or place that might be a partner in design—with which these questions could be pursued.
