Reflecting on 'The future is a work in progress' at the Festival of Futures
Report by Nigel Thompson, 15 March 2024
Beyond Imagination is a radical £13.2 million 3 year research project at ImaginationLancaster funded by Research England to explore and demonstrate how cutting-edge design research can create a healthier, more prosperous and sustainable world.
As Impact Manager I focus on developing and nurturing key strategic partnerships in collaboration with theme and cluster leads. I lead on the development and and organisation of Impact events and on the development and delivery of the Communications Strategy and PR to promote research outcomes at a local and national and international level. I also work with the Evaluation PDRA and PhD to deliver a range of activities designed to evaluate research outcomes.
I joined ImaginationLancaster 2012 as Design Manager for EU INTERREG PROUD project and then the the AHRC Leapfrog project. My role as Design Manager focussed on activating citizens, public sector and community partners to participate in co-design projects. Facilitating these complex collaborative design process across strategic, management and operational strands in order for new and innovative solutions to emerge with collective ownership of outcomes.
Report by Nigel Thompson, 15 March 2024
Report by Nigel Thompson, 8 March 2024
Publication day
Seeing the bigger picture through data and insights
Justin McGuirk, Director Future Observatory and Chief Curator, Design Museum
Seeing the bigger picture through data and insights
building connections for future collaborations
Impact can continue long after the project is ended
Author: George Kafka, Future Observatory Curator
How can we all play a part in climate action?
22nd November 2022, LICA Building, Lancaster University from 10am - 1pm
A Lancaster University project, capturing an in-depth picture of how people live and work in two northern local authority districts, will help shape the future of the area.
Life Survey summary findings and six case studies launched today.
April 2022
Memorandum of Understanding signed between Lancaster University and Lancaster City Council
A partnership is forged between ImaginationLancaster and Stanbic Bank’s Accelerate in Botswana.
Flourishing Organisations - 20th May 2021
ImaginationLancaster investigates major areas of modern life from health to travel to help shape the future of two local districts
ImaginationLancaster Design Summit
ImaginationLancaster Design Summit: Flourish Together
an online film premiere to rival any blockbuster movie
ImaginationLancaster Design Summit Series 2021
The launch of a series of new short films which capture the essence of the spirit of Imagination
Two weeks flies by when you’re wading through a variety of literature on innovation, design, participation and every combination therein.
Tool sharing with Cilip: The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals
Leapfrog is working closely with Rebecca Addey, a Paediatric Patient Experience Officer at Blackpool Victoria Hospital and her colleagues as part of the Rigorous Stories project at Lancaster
It’s been just over a year since Leapfrog has visited Child Action Northwest to spend time with the young co-designers we worked with for the Working with Young People project
The Derbyshire Matrix tool was officially launched on Monday 6th February to 150 social workers, clinicians, police and fire offices, housing and environmental health officials and drug and alcohol specialists. Dee and Laura share their experience
Since October last year, Leapfrog has been working with a group of young people to co-design tools to make sure adults in authority hear their voices
Leapfrog presented at a workshop led by the Public Collaboration Lab – an AHRC funded research partnership between London Borough of Camden and University of the Arts London, Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab (UAL DESIS Lab). The workshop explored the value of creative engagement and consultation
Leapfrog held a large, interactive tool sharing event at Lancaster University to close the Major Project 'Working with Young People' and share the tools that have been co-designed since it began in August 2015
The Leapfrog Team invite Early Career Researchers (ECR) from across the Arts and Humanities to participate in a Summer School from the 4th– 8th July 2016 at The Institute of Design Innovation’s Highland Studio in Forres – a beautiful town in the North of Scotland
Since we designed tools with a group of eleven young people in November last year, Laura has been putting together a newspaper that contains the tools and stories of how they could be used, which Leapfrog intends to share widely with other young people and social workers. In the spirit of co-design, we produced a draft copy to take to show the young designers to get their input, which would include the name of the newspaper and features throughout
Dee Hennessy blogs about the recent two-day Leapfrog young people's co-design residential
A critical part of Leapfrog’s first major research project is the phase where we will facilitate a co-design process with young people aged 13-17. To prepare for this we met with Leapfrog Advisory Board member Emma Barrett. Emma leads Silk Innovation Lab, a small team based within Kent County Council set up in 2007 to ‘do policy differently’
A Research Dimensions plan for the research that will take place throughout the Working with Young People major project for Leapfrog has been produced
IDEAS for Impact ran a session to help early career academics engage with communities outside Lancaster University as part of OED's training programme
There seems to be an emerging case that some challenges of engaging with young people are universal, across all types of engagement, from one-to-one working up to national policy. As unlikely as this seems our tentative analysis of our first activity exploring public sector engagement with young people seems to be pointing in this direction
After using the zoners in their original form at a few public events, Helen Ryan, Public Realm Development Manager from Lancaster City Council found that some extra features would be useful
The IDEAS for Impact team are busy preparing for an exciting workshop at the V&A museum in London on the 24th of February
The £1.2 million AHRC project launches with a week long workshop and community consultation project drawing together partners from Lancashire with researches from Imagination and Glasgow School of Art
Over 5 weeks during November and December 2014 the PROUD team delivered ‘Facemooc’ an innovative, online course in co-design. The first of its kind to utilise Facebook as a platform for open online learning
Imagination is looking for someone interested in exploiting the potential of social media to share information and promote collaboration as part of a new project called Leapfrog. This 3 year £1.25million AHRC project will explore how we can help more people be more creative and collaborative with a focus on the public sector
A workshop for the European Union sponsored Design Days event
A creative, supportive and collaborative learning experience, aimed at equipping and improving your co-design knowledge, skills and contacts
With presentations from Charles Leadbetter and Liz Sanders preceding our presentation we could not have asked for a better platform for us to talk about the Proud Beyond the Castle project and how this relates to the wider Synergize conference
Honest insights into the challenges and benefits of group work were shared by local government officers across Lancashire, all who have elements of public consultation, planning or group work in their roles as they took part in the last of the 'Working With Groups' event series at ImaginationLab
We were invited to deliver a workshop hosted by the Creativity Team within the Scottish Government, who are responsible for organisational development, leadership and learning. The workshop aimed to explore the value design can bring to public sector activities
Lancashire County Council received the news they’d been waiting for in securing £59,000 for the Heritage Lottery ‘Our Heritage’ Fund (HLF) for an 18 month programme of learning and engagement activities for the fascinating site explored in the PROUD co-design challenge ‘Beyond the Castle’
Working with a group of highly experienced co-designers, group leaders and facilitators, this high level masterclass in Eindhoven explored the nature of excellent group working and facilitation
How should public sector workers approach co-design to get the maximum benefit? In collaboration with Lancaster City Council Imagination delivered a masterclass to senior public sector workers in Luxembourg
The first Working With Groups event took place at The Storey in Lancaster. Participants ranged from leaders of Friends Groups for green space projects, a Scout Leader, youth workers, a cultural social enterprise that co-designs projects with communities and staff from Lancaster and Morecambe Libraries
Contrasting perspectives on Co-Design from the industrial heartlands of Germany to the vibrant new landscape of Cape Town, World Design Capital
In the final year of PROUD, our Essen partner the Red Dot Design Museum is hosting the PROUD forum. This international forum aims to explore how design as a discipline reacts to social change, presenting the new tools, methods and thought processes used, and together assess their potential in terms of their productive and social value
Exploring the values and implications of co-design approaches at the PROUD Forum
It was a well timed opportunity to participate in PROUD FORUM in Germany
(but it needs to work with others disciplines!)
The PROUD team were keenly aware that our contribution to the CX enabled us to engage with some of the leading international experts in creative knowledge exchange
Making it Fun, Effective and Collaborative
The UK PROUD team were aware that through the project so far we have developed a number of highly transferable and useful knowledge exchange tools
In discussion with Helen, after the 1st test we decided not to design a cover for the metal ground pins available at the Council
This project presented both a significant challenge and a distinct learning curve. However, the final products are the strong and successful result of the careful consideration the team put into every aspect of these tools
The successes at this point included progress made on the commenters. We had refined the notch design to ensure the shapes were a usable size which didn’t interfere with an A6 card when they interlocked
Our principal feeling about Dutch Design Week is that Eindhoven is a playground for ideas skilfully made reality. The festival explored what design practice could be in myriad ways as well as showing how people could choose to practice together
Lancaster University and Lancaster City Council present their Co-Design of Consultation Tools project at high profile gathering of co-design masters in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week
With the prototypes and designs ready for testing, the full project team met to review the progress. We gave a re-cap of the work completed so far, talking Helen, Leon and Gemma through our design process and the thinking behind the prototypes
The Knowledge Exchange conference was conceived as having three distinct phases and each one of these would have a different feel. With the final morning we wanted people to come into a very austere space with no furniture to introduce our eight KE manifesto points and then literally open the space into something much more dynamic and visual
Since the last meeting, the process of generating ideas, developing and producing tools the team can experiment and play with has moved quickly and yielded unexpected results
The final event on the Thursday of The Knowledge Exchange conference was a panel session held at the Storey Institute in Lancaster
Using coffee houses in The Knowledge Exchange Conference as a comfortable location for group discussion around selected themes
Dee Hennessey reflects on the way in which she developed and facilitated a unique and interactive way for the authors to present their conference papers
As preparation for the Knowledge Exchange Conference at Lancaster University in September, the PROUD project arranged for our keynote speaker for the conference Marc Tassoul (TU Delft) event to run a masterclass on creative facilitation on the day before the conference
The conference is taking place on the 26th and 27th September 2013 at Lancaster University, and is aimed at exploring and propagating new mutually beneficial exchanges between academia and the creative industries
The PROUD project in the UK is taking an exciting new direction. After the rather intense, highly designed activities of Beyond the Castle we were looking for a different kind of challenge
Together with Leon and Gemma from PROUD we met with Helen Ryan, Public Realm Officer at Lancaster City Council, on Friday morning. Having revisited the key ideas identified for potential development in July, we spent the morning exploring what Helen considered most important about using the tools, and separating ideal-luxury elements from those she considers an absolute necessity
Three Design Management students elected to work with the PROUD project to design a Modular Business Plan for Design Innovation Hubs for their final Masters thesis. The outcomes of their research will benefit PROUD partners who have invested in the creation of Design Innovation Hubs for their region and are seeking ways to make the hubs financially sustainable in the long term
Laser cutters are extremely useful pieces of equipment and we use the PROUD laser cutter at least a few times a week. There is a danger though that they are used in only a basic way just to cut things
Disaster struck on arrival at Brussels airport when we were informed there was a baggage handler strike and that we should not reply on getting our luggage until the end of the week. After an epic journey by rail and an emergency shopping trip to a mall to buy some essentials we settled down to the partner meeting which was held at Technoport, a newly regenerated area which includes new university buildings and space for business and a FabLab, all set within in a now defunct steelworks landscape
Attracting people to public consultation events and convincing people their input can make a real difference are challenges Helen Ryan regularly faces in her role as Public Realm Officer for Lancaster City Council
MA Design Management student makes significant new contribution to the design of knowledge exchange and consultation tools
A simple but effective tool for addressing action points in meetings
Exhibition runs from Friday16th - Tuesday 20th November 2012 at The Storey Creative Industries Centre, Lancaster
This interactive exhibition draws together all the knowledge and ideas emerging from the events and tells the story of the journey 'Beyond the Castle' so far. PICTURE THIS allows everyone to be a co-designer
When the UK contingent of PROUD suggested we deliver a master class on Co-Design we knew we were in for an interesting developmental journey
Dutch design week is fast becoming one of the highlights of the global design calendar highlights
The day started well bright sunshine after a week of rain and there we where strategically positioned between The Storey Institute and the Priory Green.
It was a bright sunny day in late Autumn when we set out on a quest to consider what was needed for a perfect day out Beyond the Castle
Our plan for this event was to engage people as co-designers by encouraging them to imagine and to create models of what they wanted to see in the park
Do you want to help shape the future of one of Lancaster's oldest public spaces? Come along and take part in a drop in co-design session on the Priory Green and at The Storey in Lancaster between 2 - 8pm on Saturday 22nd September
Beyond the Castle SECOND event in 2012. Don't miss your chance to be involved in shaping the future of a public park in Lancaster
It was at 9.20am on Saturday 4th August that we knew this co-design event was really going to work. The model of the open spaces beyond the castle had been erected before the market traders had set up and there it all was, with its pink signage, in the market square, making quite a spectacle of itself as the sun started to shine on everything
Volunteer information and development session on Weds 25th July
In Olympic countdown week, we kicked off our volunteer development programme for the PROUD funded, Lancaster City Park project, with two volunteer development sessions on
A new approach to open to all citizen-led innovation, a hectic Saturday morning in Morecambe
The new design team for the City Park co-design challenge came together for the first time this week and renamed the co-design project to 'Beyond the Castle'
The World Design Capital designation is a unique city promotion project that celebrates the accomplishments of cities that have used design as a tool to reinvent themselves and improve social, cultural and economic life
As one of the leading thinks in the field, Peter lead a workshop with PhD students on the nature, restrictions and future of Open Design
The PROUD project officially launched in the UK on Tuesday 8th May at ImaginationLab. Over 100 people from business, academic, government and local communities came to hear how co-design is being used to solve complex societal challenges in Lancashire and across Northern Europe
We are pleased to announce an open invitation to the launch of the PROUD project at ImaginationLab on the 8th May. Keynote speaker is Stéphane Vincent, founder of the French innovation lab La 27e Région, a laboratory for the co-design of public policy
An event at the Storey Creative Industries Centre to turn project consultation in the start of a co-design process. Here people started to design the intervention process for the next 6 months
Proud sensitising event with the elected members of Lancaster City Council
Lancaster University is seeking to procure a pool of designers to work closely with the PROUD project team to develop innovative co-design interventions to address local co-design challenges, broadly looking at place, product and service design
The Master Class work package that Lancaster are leading as part of the Proud project took a big step forward recently with structures, techniques and topics fixed at a meeting in Eindhoven hosted by Capital D with Designregion Kortrijk from Belgium also in attendance
The newly appointed Design Managers for Lancaster University and The Storey Creative Industries Centre presented the concept for the Lancaster Design Innovation Hub to partners from across North West Europe
Life Survey Impact Accelerator
Seeing the bigger picture through data and insights
ImaginationLancaster investigates major areas of modern life from health to travel to help shape the future of two local districts
Participants at a Leapfrog and World Design Weeks workshop at Dutch Design Week 2019
An interactive conference, which took place on the 26th and 27th of September 2013 that explored academic engagement with the creative sector as part of The Creative Exchange project
Working with designers, businesses, academics and the public to promote innovation through new types of Knowledge Exchange
PROUD are designing tools for creative public consultation in a collaboration with Lancaster City Council aiming to improve the uptake, creativity and effectiveness of public consultations
A 5 week online course for design professionals interested in co-design
Write a new chapter in the history of Lancaster's green space
The Leapfrog project will be a close collaboration with public sector and community partners to design and evaluate new approaches to consultation.