Integrating Engagement and Design: Lessons from High Street

As expectations for people-centred, resilient, and culturally grounded streets continue to rise, the way we plan, engage and design must evolve too. The High Street Improvements project was an opportunity to rethink how design and engagement can operate as interconnected disciplines that actively inform one another.

Guided by the City Centre Masterplan 2020 (CCMP), Auckland Council has been undertaking transformative streetscape changes over the past decade.

Boffa Miskell’s landscape design team and engagement team were appointed to the High Street Improvements project through two separate open procurement processes. Because the teams bid independently, they are able to offer separate expertise, but a shared ethos in how they approached the project. This was guided by Boffa Miskell’s purpose, Together | Shaping better places and the values that underpin how we work: collaboration, care, accountability, creativity and trust.

Following the sharing of shortlisted design ideas with the community, lead landscape architect Yoko Tanaka and engagement specialist Anne Cunningham explain how the engagement and design workstreams have interacted throughout the design process to date. 

Design perspective:

Yoko: Boffa Miskell champions bold, people-oriented, place-based design. Our creativity is deliberate and grounded in a strong design vision, strengthened by feedback. We see critique as an essential tool that sharpens our ideas and elevates outcomes. Creativity for us is about applying our design expertise with curiosity and purpose. We test and refine ideas through what we hear from communities and stakeholders, ensuring our design vision resonates with what matters most to them. Listening is part of our creative strength and what makes our design work genuinely meaningful. 

Engagement perspective: 

Anne: Boffa Miskell’s involvement in the High Street Improvements project began with community engagement in July of 2024, and our objectives were clear: establish a path for future designs or changes guided by the community’s aspirations for High Street and the surrounding area. We aimed to engage a diverse audience that reflects the range of interests and demographics within the High Street community. Building trust and support from the community and stakeholders was essential, achieved through transparency, integrity, and competence. Throughout the process, we worked to keep the community informed and involved, ensuring there were no surprises as options for the future were developed.

Working together:

Yoko: Working as independent teams within one company brings both challenges and opportunities. Design and engagement operate at different rhythms, and timing pressures can create friction when design development and engagement documentation arrive out of sync. However, these challenges highlight an opportunity: moving beyond stage-based handovers toward a more iterative process. Real-time exchanges between engagement and design would strengthen integration and responsiveness, ensuring that community insights continue to shape the design as it evolves, and design direction informs the engagement process.

Anne: Early clarity from engagement saves time later by preventing misaligned design directions. When the engagement team can establish a strong foundation of community priorities upfront, it means the design team can move forward with confidence, avoiding costly rework or missteps that can impact community trust during later stages of the project. Genuine, evidence-based feedback supports confident decision-making and enables changes to the design in response to what really matters. This is where the dual-team approach proves its value: it reduces assumptions and brings efficiency to the process.

Working independently:

Yoko: We are intentional about keeping our perspective unbiased, ensuring that design decisions are not shaped by internal assumptions but by genuine insight. On this project, both teams were appointed separately, which created a clear, authentic pathway for community feedback, balancing design excellence with community authenticity.

Anne: Keeping that separation also ensures the engagement team can fully support the design process. Our role is to identify potential controversies early and dig beneath the surface of those issues and clarify so they can be addressed during design and in the bridging between engagement and design. At the same time, we respect that the design team needs its own space and time to process the place and develop ideas. There are other technical stakeholders who enable that creative process, and the independence of the engagement team allows us to focus on the social dimension in how we influence the design.

The process:

Anne: Phase One and Two of the three-step engagement process involved initial conversations with local High Street businesses and residents; followed by continuing the conversation and expanding outreach to include visitors, shoppers, and other people using High Street. The insights from Phases One and Two generated a series of nine Community Aspirations, and these guided the design brief, which Council used as part of the procurement process to appoint the design lead. The Boffa Miskell design team were successful in being appointed in that role.

Yoko: The design team worked with the engagement findings, alongside input from technical experts, asset owners and operators, and mana whenua to develop three Design Ideas in response to the Community Aspirations. The three Design Ideas are essentially outcome options that bring a different level of change to High Street, ranging from a light upgrade through to a big transformation. Each of these, of course, comes with different levels of cost, time of construction, and impact during construction

Anne: Phase Three of the engagement process presented the three Design Ideas for feedback: asking people to what extent each idea met the nine Community Aspirations identified in Phase One and Two; what works well, and what needs further thought. We also asked focused questions related to construction impacts and the introduction of timed bollards in all three Design Ideas, as these elements are key to the community’s understanding of what a good outcome looks like.

What’s next?

Yoko: For the design team, it’s likely that the High Street Improvements project will continue into further design development stages, creating a real opportunity to embed this integrated way of working more deliberately. and ensuring that the High Street community is informed and involved throughout, ensuring no surprises as options for the future are developed.

For our Boffa Miskell design teams, we’re confident that the methodology we’re developing with the High Street Improvements can be applied to future projects. There is space to build on the collaborative behaviours already established, allowing design and engagement to evolve together rather than simply operating in parallel.

Anne: The design team and the engagement team each carries its own scope, skills, and accountability, yet we have been able to operate with a shared ethos and within the same project objectives. From the outset, both teams committed to a unified approach where community insight, cultural context, and design thinking are not sequential steps but independent threads woven together into one project methodology.

As the High Street project continues – and as we find other opportunities to work together, this neutral platform is allowing us to refine collaborative behaviours with a shared focus on outcomes for people and place, showing how engagement can deepen design, how design can give form to collective aspirations, and how both disciplines can operate with autonomy while contributing to a seamless, cohesive whole.