Engaged ran as a design research project, to think about a simple concept of reusing vacant high street units as toilets (plus commercial or community space), and to grow the idea, rather than to implement an idea that had already been figured out. It wasn’t just about the physical design. We explored how it would fit into current systems and infrastructure by speaking with people within retail, community safety, government, and urban design. Once we had an idea of how it could be implemented (within councils, through regeneration) we spoke with regeneration officers to think about how they could make it happen. This was through alternative (non-toilet related) funding streams. The council would oversee the design, build and management of the toilets but a business could be incentivised to supervise and maybe clean it. We learnt about the problems within this task through interviews with pub staff responsible for toilets. We also found where the gaps are in current toilet provision by speaking with the public within the existing neighbourhood in Hackney Central.

We know that public toilets are a complex topic where there’s a lot that can go wrong. This is why public toilets are in such a sorry state currently. Our awareness of these different challenges led us to look in all these different directions, to understand what the public want, what the councils can achieve and where the system will trip them up. The limitation is that we haven’t explored any one aspect at greater depth to a point where we have all the answers. Instead, we’ve uncovered a few key areas, that have the most potential to pursue, and where we have evidence to support future, focused studies to really fix the problems.

The final report on the Engaged project and shared with research collaborators and funders