IDEAS for Impact Tools are part of Democratic Renewal in Scotland

The team developed and delivered a three hour session called ‘Making Space for Democracy’ on the 11th of June in Edinburgh, which was part of the Scottish Goverment’s Participation Week. The workshop attracted over 40 registered participants from public services in Scotland, who were taken through a series of provocations and activities to discuss and come up with ideas for how the government could make space for democratic renewal (engaging people with politics).

The team used various new methods and tools for the activities in the workshop.  The session kicked-off with a number of provocations around democratic spaces, these included two, two and a half minute, low-fi video clips from Ingrid van der Wacht a Project Manager from Brainport Eindhoven and Heather Daam an academic co-ordinator from the Institute Without Boundaries in Toronto, Canada.   Both Ingrid and Heather talked about their experiences of successful community spaces and suggested the reasons they thought they had been a success, giving the participants in the room something creative to think about at the beginning of the workshop.

Another tool used, was the IDEAS Hexagon Cards, which were transformed into a means to build models around selected themes for democratic renewal.  The three different coloured ‘hub cards’ were labeled for the categories ‘types of places’, ‘methods’ and ‘groups of people’ and were given to groups of 4-5 people with a large card sheet with slots to enable the cards to be attached to the sheet to create the model.  Many of the groups created 3D models with the cards to enhance their ideas.

The event will hopefully be the first of many future democratic renewal events to come in Scotland.