Ms Maja Luna Jorgensen

Professional experience

Maja is a Visiting Fellow with the Design Group at The Open University as part of her Innovation Scholar in Design secondment to the OU, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI).

Maja has over 20 years' experience as a transdisciplinary practitioner in the field of societal change through approaches such as community capacity building, placemaking, health innovation, and social and community-led housing. She has worked for organisations such as Greater London Authority, Plymouth Community Homes, Health Innovation South West, and The Glass-House Community-Led Design.

Research interests

As a transdisciplinary researcher and practitioner, Maja has a broad field of interests and expertise:

• Collaborative design practices, co-design
• Asset Based Community Development
• Community leadership and ownership
• Indigenous knowledges
• The more-than-human
• Collective imagination and futuring
• Participatory ecological futures
• Housing and health
• Just transitions

Current projects

Radical Roots, a collaborative research project addressing inequalities of opportunity through place-based co-design approaches. I'm leading this partnership project with Zebra Collective, based at Mount Wise Neighbourhood Centre in Devonport, Plymouth. 

• More information about the research
• Collaborative case study developed with project partners
• Video of the community-led 24-hour transformation of the community garden that was co-designed through the project

Find Your Village, a flexible, co-produced approach to enabling peer support in pregnancy and the early years (the ‘first 1001 days’) for communities and neighbourhoods developed by Tom Allport of University of Bristol/Sirona Care and Health in partnership with Barton Hill Activity Club. Providing strategic design consultancy towards a transferable resource for the approach, in partnership with independent researcher Hannah Arnett of Studio Altaa. 

Council of Archaeological Beings: a more-than-human archaeology; a project led by Alice Clough and Sadie Watson of Museum of London Archaeology. Co-design and strategic consultant to an exploratory project working towards designing a new tool to support the interpretative practices of archaeologists in the developer-funded sector.

Muddy Waters: A collaborative and reflexive piece exploring everyday ethics in participatory research through practitioner views. A conversation piece on the 'muddy waters' of working in an embedded and relational way in communities. In partnership with Roisin Bartlam, University of Plymouth. 

Previous projects

As a practitioner, I have led and contributed to a range of cross-sector and interdisciplinary projects exploring design, innovation and systems change.

With The Glass-House Community Led Design
Contributed to research examining how capability approaches can strengthen sustainable and resilient co-design practices within communities. Selected projects:

• Empowering Design Practices - exploring how community-led design supports communities to shape historic places of worship into more vibrant, sustainable places that enhance their heritage.

• Cross-pollination - exploring how to grow cross-sector design collaboration in placemaking

• Starting from values: Evaluating intangible legacies.

Within local government and health innovation
Led interdisciplinary projects developing new models of collaboration and service design. Selected projects:

• Lung Health @home: Led a cross-sector team, in partnership with NHS England, to develop and evaluate a national approach supporting self-management of long-term respiratory conditions at home.
• Community Led Housing Hub for London: Incubated and launched a city-wide hub to advance the field of community-led housing through strategic partnership, policy development, and practitioner engagement.

Publications

• 10 simple rules for contemporary participatory geography – Geography Directions. A collaborative blog with members of the Participatory Geographies Research Group at the Royal Geographical Society with IBG.
• Video and remote consultations: Digital exclusion and workforce impacts in South West England. Led project to explore the impacts of remote consultations in healthcare. Three linked reports present insights:
  • Rapid review: Video consultations and digitally excluded people
  • Delivering remote consultations in ophthalmology in the South West of England - Insights into clinician and operational experience  
  • Digital Exclusion: Patient Experience of Video Consultations
• Increasing Electronic Repeat Dispensing in the Southwest of England. Led project resulting in report into a qualitative training method to support uptake of eRd. Read the executive summary
• Book: Nordic Light: Interpretations in architecture (2011). Translations and copy writing.