Hayes Davidson is passionate about inclusivity and ensuring that wherever possible we help contribute to a more equitable and democratic conversation around the built environment.
We want to use our influence within our industry to encourage people to do better. In that spirit, we have developed a diversity database to ensure that our images of future developments accurately represent the people who will live and work in the places we visualise.
The idea for the database originated in 2020 and was part of our collective response to the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement. Like many creative studios, we came together as a workforce to talk about what we could do that would be meaningful for our industry and the work we are engaged in. We had some passionate and productive conversations – one of which was about representation.
Realising that the representation of diversity within our image database was inadequate, we set about rectifying that. First, we needed the data which would help overcome individual artists’ assumptions or biases. Using open-source census records, we created a demographic database for each and every London borough that worked as a reference point and gave us information on age, ethnicity, gender and disability, against which we could check the accuracy of our images. Next, we began to work with our photographers to improve our visual assets and ensure that we had access to a diverse and representative set of images of people and communities, tagging these in a way that meant they were readily accessible for our artists. Finally, we have created a diversity checklist which, combined with the unconscious bias training that we have offered our teams, means they can ensure that clothing, actions, placement and any cultural sensitives are all considered when creating the final images.
We’ve used the demographic database to support recent projects including Camden Highline and Doon Street where community engagement and consultation have been critical to the development of these schemes and in ensuring their long-term success. At Doon Street, we also organised a community filming day with local residents of various ages, abilities and ethnicities to animate a fly-through of the new scheme and facilities.
We are now extending the database to include other regions and countries that we work in, and looking within the coming year to make our database open-source to help boost our industry’s progress in creating inclusive visual assets.
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