Thinking + talking adaptability: diagrams for time and change in the built environment

The Adaptable Futures (afr) group at Loughborough University has sought to improve stakeholders' capacity to deliver adaptable building designs and the adaptive reuse of our building stock and urban spaces. The research has provided an expanded and refined understanding of how to design for and implement adaptability: a response to what we see as a lack of shared understanding across stakeholders and a need to (re)conceptualize buildings in context and time. Buildings can no longer be conceived as static and isolated objects, but as unfinished social products susceptible to change and demanding of strategies to accommodate the diverse cycles of their constituting parts and stakeholders.