Imagination in the Community
Proud to be a part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science
Socially responsible design, co-design, inclusive design, tool design, engagement, facilitation
In 2022, Laura Wareing started work in the Lancaster University Medical School researching how to engage with underrepresented people to feed into the Lancashire and South Cumbria New Hospitals Programme. The project was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Participatory Research.
Laura was a Research Associate on the AHRC Design Leadership Fellowship with Professor Paul Rodgers in 2020. On this project, she co-edited the Adventures in Design Research book and co-edited and designed the ‘What Design Research Does…’ cards
She recently submitted her PhD as part of Transformation North West, a cohort of twelve PhD students supported by five universities throughout the North West of England led by Lancaster, funded by the NWCDTP through the AHRC. On TNW, PhD researchers collaborated on projects with businesses and organisations in the North West to develop new products and services in support of the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy.
Laura’s PhD research explored design’s role in meaningful engagement on future prospects with young people living in underserved places in the North West of England. She is conducting this through a series of collaborative projects with organisations and businesses in the region. One of the projects, Redesign by the Sea, can be viewed here and was showcased at the Design Research for Change Showcase at London Design Fair in 2019.
Previous to her PhD research, Laura worked for over five years in ImaginationLancaster in various co-design and knowledge exchange focused research and design roles. This included the role of Research Associate for Leapfrog, for which Laura worked with various organisations including the NHS, Lancashire City Council, Blackburn with Darwen Council, Child Action North West and led the development of tools for young people in care and the Inspirer newspaper, which won a British Youth Council award for innovation.
Laura’s background includes a degree in Industrial Design and a Masters in Multidisciplinary Design Innovation, both from Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Proud to be a part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science
Transforming communities through placed-based inter-connectivity between enterprise and design
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
Can Leapfrog co-design tools with the governors at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust to help them synthesize information and share it?
Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust provides health and wellbeing services such as health visiting, sexual health, and dentistry across Lancashire at over more than 400 sites. They have over 9000 members who have joined because they want to have their voice heard in an organisation that matters to them, as well as be kept up-to-date and informed about services and events
New inclusive tools co-designed with Ben Pearson at Healthwatch in Blackburn have been used to help different groups, varying in age to give their opinion on health and wellbeing related issues with great success
Members of the Leapfrog team recently supported and ran workshops with pupils from local schools, Heysham High and Stepping Stones, a pupil referral primary school, who were visiting Lancaster University to learn about university life and comic art as part of a project called The Comic Project
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
Sarah Campbell from the V&A Museum joins the Leapfrog team to develop tools to help understand the creative process
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 has produced a newspaper called The Inspirer to share tools co-designed by young people to ensure adults in authority hear their voices
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
This morning Leapfrog Research Associate, Laura visited a small group of charity volunteers at their offices in Lancaster to share with them information about the Leapfrog project and four tools
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
Six open innovation platform case studies have been written for the OpTex project, which cover Fab Labs, Facemooc, LEGO Ideas, MIT Media Lab, .Net Gadgeteer and P&G Connect + Develop
The TimeTape tools are rolls of paper tape printed with different divisions of time, including a working day and a working week to help groups plan activities and projects
The IDEAS for Impact project recently added two new free downloadable tools to the Collaboration and Impact Toolbox website
The OpTex project started in earnest recently with a scoping workshop held in the fabulous INNVENTIA laboratories in Stockholm. In this project Imagination is helping this research institution to further develop its approaches to open innovation
IDEAS for Impact ran a session to help early career academics engage with communities outside Lancaster University as part of OED's training programme
Following the 'Fostering Creativity' workshop for the V&A Museum, IDEAS for Impact has produced a tool for tracking the team's inspiration
IDEAS for Impact Contributes to OED's Proposal Writing Day
Sarah Campbell, Head of Schools, Families and Young People at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London describes the workshop designed and delivered by the IDEAS for Impact project
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 IDEAS for Impact project developed and delivered a workshop on democratic renewal for the Scottish Government this month
IDEAS for Impact ran a workshop to offer strategic and practical support for academics from across Lancaster University interested in developing more impactful research
Researchers and academics from the Faculty of Arts and Social Science attended a workshop on Creative Facilitation in Research on Monday 8th December. The workshop was designed and run by the IDEAS for Impact team, who shared some of their tools and techniques
A downloadable tool to help facilitators document and evaluate the new tools they employ in workshops and other sessions
Working with the Scottish Government's Creativity Team and drawing on the research of Imagination PhD student Dee Hennessey we are tackling the challenges of workshop evaluation. Try the free resources included in this post
A workshop for the European Union sponsored Design Days event
Last month, the IDEAS for Impact project delivered a workshop that brought together people from all faculties of the university sharing interests and experience in additive manufacturing technology
3D printing is a hugely disruptive technology, with implications that reach deep into business models, engineering approaches and cultural assumptions. Understanding these implications and the opportunities accompanying them requires thinking and research that crosses between disciplines and faculties
IDEAS for Impact offer support and help design tools for a CX event
3…2…1 Blastoff! IDEAS for Impact Tweet up launches for the first time
Focusing on ‘Interesting Group Collaborations’
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
The IDEAS for Impact project has time and funding to support collaborative research projects at Lancaster University
The IDEAS for Impact project have launched a new free online resource to help Lancaster academics collaborate and initiate high impact research
Ideas for Impact is a Lancaster University project to support academics across the University in conducting excellent research with significance to the outside world. We are especially interested in helping newly appointed academics to develop high impact research
The Meeting Action Points Tool is available to download and customise
Imagination designed, organised and hosted a five-hour workshop for the Lancaster China Catalyst Programme (LCCP) on the 13th of January 2014. The aim of the workshop was to detail each section of the four-year project plan
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
Useful, well-designed communication and tools played an important role in the interactions taking place at the Knowledge Exchange conference
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
As part of The Knowledge Exchange conference a New IDEAS digital tool was created to capture a starting point for 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 New IDEAS Hexagon Tool is a tactile and versatile method for connecting together ideas in multiple directions during brainstorming, meetings, workshops and other events where knowledge needs to be exchanged
New Ideas helping 'FST' to collaborate more effectively and provide a more coherent voice for feedback to strategic proposals through the design of a new series of forum events
A simple but effective tool for revealing motivations in knowledge exchange projects
A simple but effective tool for addressing action points in meetings
The three part series of labs run as part of the New Ideas project may have finished in December 2012, but the development of the tools created in the labs continues this year
This week, we completed the final of three labs with the leading knowledge exchange practitioners in the University, marking the end of the first phase if the New IDEAS project
Participants generated tool ideas that would be useful for knowledge exchange activities across the University
Asking the Right Questions to Frame Knowledge Exchange Challenges
Designing Tools for Designing Knowledge Exchange & High Impact Research
A Paper on Designing Knowledge Exchange is Presented at the 2012 DMI Conference
Imagination delivered a workshop with the theme of 'Creative Conversations' on Friday 20th April as part of the Brief Encounters project
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
Open innovation for textile-like materials made on a paper machine
The aim of New IDEAS is to develop, refine and disseminate highly innovative knowledge exchange approaches to local, academic, creative industries and stakeholders that are not dependent on delivery by staff from Imagination for success
A project to help Lancaster University academics undertake high impact, excellent research
An AHRC Network project to explore new forms of collaborative design processes
The Leapfrog project will be a close collaboration with public sector and community partners to design and evaluate new approaches to consultation.