About OurPlace
OurPlace is a collaborative digital platform designed to bring ideas, people, and decisions together to shape better places.
OurPlace is a collaborative digital platform designed to support better place-making decisions through structured engagement, transparent communication, and shared design thinking.
The platform brings together ideas, design options, stakeholder feedback, and project discussions into a single organised digital workspace where teams can explore alternatives, document insights, and move towards informed design decisions.
Planning and development projects often involve many participants — councils, developers, designers, community members, and property owners — yet the ideas and discussions that shape projects are frequently scattered across meetings, emails, reports, and presentations. Important insights can easily be lost or disconnected.
OurPlace addresses this challenge by creating a structured online environment where ideas, communications, and decision records can be saved, shared, and reviewed collectively. By organising collaboration in one place, the platform helps project teams move from early concepts to well-informed place-making decisions more efficiently and transparently.
The goal of OurPlace is simple:
To make collaboration clearer, engagement more meaningful, and place-making decisions better informed.
About Qbix Digital
Qbix Digital is the digital innovation arm of Qbix, an interdisciplinary studio working across architecture, planning, and urban design with a strong focus on place-making and neighbourhood development.
Over many years, the Qbix practice has been involved in a range of urban planning, residential development, and community-focused projects across New Zealand, working with councils, developers, communities, and multidisciplinary design teams.
Through these projects, the organisation developed extensive experience in the consultation and engagement processes that shape the planning and design of successful places. This experience highlighted the need for more structured and digitally supported collaboration tools that can help project teams organise ideas, capture feedback, and maintain transparency throughout the design and decision-making process.
Qbix Digital was established to develop such tools — combining experience from the built environment sector with emerging digital technologies.
OurPlace is one of the key platforms developed under this initiative, representing a step towards modernising how planning, design, and community engagement processes are managed in the digital age.
Building on its long-standing presence in New Zealand, the broader Qbix practice has recently expanded its professional engagement into Australia, extending its place-making collaborations across the wider region.
About the Founder
OurPlace was conceived and developed by the founder of Qbix, a planning and urban design professional with more than 30 years of experience in place-making projects across New Zealand.
An award-winning planner and urban designer, the founder has been closely involved in the planning and design of a number of significant neighbourhood development projects, particularly within Auckland and the Bay of Plenty regions.
Throughout decades of professional practice, the founder worked extensively with councils, developers, communities, and multidisciplinary design teams to shape urban environments and neighbourhoods. Through this experience, a recurring challenge became clear: while projects benefit from many valuable ideas and perspectives, these insights are often scattered across meetings, reports, emails, and informal discussions.
The idea behind OurPlace emerged from this practical experience — to create a structured digital environment where ideas, feedback, design exploration, and decision records can be organised in one place. By bringing collaboration into a shared platform, OurPlace aims to support a more transparent, inclusive, and efficient approach to shaping the places where people live, work, and connect.