The Active Parks project aims to bring together local residents, the Friends of Ryelands Park, Lancaster City Council and health organisations to work together to design (‘co-design’) a health trail which meets local needs in Ryelands Park, in Lancaster.

The aim of the project is to develop a ‘health trail’, which offers a new way of motivating and taking physical activity specific to local people in their park. This may include different levels of physical activity which can be fit into a general walk or dog walking schedule, the use of new technology to link to further information or perhaps the use of augmented reality and games.

The possibilities are numerous and very exciting.   Active Parks will be running a number of ‘co-design’ workshops with local residents to share their experiences of using  the park, to help come up with ideas and with the help of designers from Lancaster University create plans or models of these ideas (prototypes) using creative tools.  One of these ideas will be taken forward to develop a mobile proof-of-concept digital prototype with the aim of augmenting a physical health trail in the park.

Active Parks will also tap into people’s familiarity with mobile technology in giving citizens a say on how such technology can be creatively used for keeping more active and healthy in their local parks.

The outcome of this project will be a set of design guidelines and early prototypes, which will be taken forward by the project team and hopefully implemented, subject to further funding.

The first part of the project is supported by the Lancaster University FASS-Enterprise Centre and the second part is supported by by Catalyst, a research project based at Lancaster University and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council- www.catalystproject.org.uk.