Other People’s Dreams is a collaborative live-action research office and educational framework. OPD engages in a critical, situated and durational way with communities in the northwest of England, exploring modes of co-production and participation that rethink the potential of people and place. These projects allow local people to prototype, evolve and establish new possibilities, activities and infrastructures within the places that they live, work and play, leading to greater agency, autonomy and empowerment.

Architects work at the service of other people. We are engaged to make real the dreams, desires and aspirations of others. Those people and those dreams have become ever more privileged, and as such the architect's role in contemporary western society is often focused on meeting the needs of a privileged elite. Our own actions and output as architects can end up perpetuating and increasing inequality even when it might not be immediately obvious. A potential role as a public or societal servant has been reduced to one that is feeding ego or profit at the expense of our health, well-being and sustenance.

Architecture, therefore, finds its purpose as either lifestyle or spectacle, but only to those that can afford it or profit from it, rather than being the tool through which we manifest something good for all people all the time. OPD proposes an alternative purpose for architecture and indeed architects. We reposition the role of the architect as a facilitator for other people's dreams, with an ambition to act as a resource that furthers access to knowledge, skills, privilege, networks and technologies that might not previously have been considered available or affordable.

Other People’s Dreams have been selected for inclusion in New Architects 5, the definitive guide to emerging British architectural talent, published summer 2026.

Currently OPD comprises Lee Ivett, Ecaterina Stefanescu, Sam Eadington and Nyima Murry.

Most of the work here has been produced with the support of the Architecture and Engineering technical team at the University of Lancashire.