Pidgin Perfect
Pidgin Perfect is a creative consultancy that adopts design and cultural activities to support resilient community building. They work across creative events, build environment development and place-making projects. What distinguishes Pidgin Perfect from other traditional architectural practices or property developers is that they place people in the centre of a place-making process.
Bottom Line
Pidgin Perfect engage diverse communities in the process of change; using design and cultural activity to create connections between people and place to build more resilient communities for everyone. As Managing Director Marc Cairns highlights: ‘We find that the core of what we do at Pidgin perfect is about having an honest conversation, and if that’s a difficult conversation to have it is still important that honesty is at the core of it.’
Why it matters?
Pidgin Perfect involve communities, through genuine consultation, in decision making processes across their built environments. They help communities understand why certain things (developments) are happening in their local built environment, but just how they are going to happen. They are interested in creating places that are sustainable for a duration of time, as well as having dialogues that are long term, rather than short term in their focus.
Starting out as a practice around the time of the financial crash in 2008, the practice focussed less on designing and making buildings, and more on planning for the future. They saw the crash as an opportunity to use their practice and skills to involve as many people as possible in decision making processes in urban spaces and cities.
Their consultation and community work depend on the input of a diverse range of voices, whilst the use of design tools and cultural activities are key as a means of carrying community engagement. In practice this could be informative interviews with community members, or it could be temporary structures or artworks that tap into people’s curiosity. Creativity plays a fundamental role in their practice.
Go deeper
- Pidgin Perfect home page
- Unusual Suspect Festival Glasgow, Pidgin Perfect session – Identity Crisis: Brand V Reality
- Marc Cairns’ – Winston Churchill Memorial Trust’s 2016 Design Fellow research report, “Empowering Young People to become Active Citizens”
- Future Positive’s interview article on Marc Cairn’s work at Pidgin Perfect
- Pidgin Perfect’s home page
