1/7 > What are you trying to achieve? Be clear about your aims to help you find the methods that will work for you. Are you aiming to understand and develop a sense of place? Foster community cohesion, capacity and skills? Reveal and share diverse histories, knowledge and experiences? Develop new design ideas for place futures? Some methods suit one-off engagement events, others suit longer-term engagement that can accumulate over time. 

2/7 > How will you support these activities? Do you have facilitators with the skills to guide people or do you need to engage others to contribute specific expertise, e.g artists, photographers, tour guides, built environment professionals etc.?

3/7 > Can you offer multiple activities at the same time? This broadens the appeal of the Urban Room and helps to build a rich context for engagement.

4/7 > Can you exhibit the results of the activities? A public exhibition of the maps, drawings, photographs, archive material, objects that are collected and produced in the Urban Room can be a really effective way of demonstrating the rich history and potential of an area, to build communal ownership of the room and to catalyse new conversations and ideas.

5/7 > How can your activities widen participation to groups and individuals who tend to be marginalised in traditional engagement? Encourage wherever possible opening up conversations to include diverse voices, stories, histories and futures.

6/7 > Can you enhance the activities in the Urban Room with digital methods of engagement, e.g. website, social media, interactive mapping tools? This will widen the reach of your engagement, bring in new audiences and potentially create a digital resource to act as a useful advocacy tool.

7/7 > How will you document thoroughly, both the processes and the outputs of the activities? This can be done through photography, film and audio. However, this needs sensitivity and you should make it clear to participants that they could be recorded, giving them a chance to opt out.