Research Themes
Co-design, civil society, action research, knowledge exchange tools, digital tool design.
Simple tools to bring people together, exchange ideas and make stronger, more active communities.
Research Question
Can new approaches to community co-design develop new innovative consultation tools to enable more appropriate, effective and engaging consultation?
Research staff
Paul Smith, Joe Lockwood, Madeline Smith
Arthi Manohar, Emma Murphy, Tom Inns.
Funding
£1.2 million funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council Connected Communities programme.
Partners and Collaborators
Leapfrog is a collaboration betweenled by ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster University, in partnership with and the Innovation School at The Glasgow School of Art.
Leapfrog is a close collaboration with public sector and community partners to design and evaluate new approaches to consultation. Consultation is, the engagement of communities in public service decision- is making. Itbecoming is becoming an increasingly important part of local and regional life with moves to help communities be more active and connected to their wider environment.
Leapfrog will helpaims to create and evaluate these new models of consultation, working initially with communities in Lancashire and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and then more broadly across the UK. Lancashire has closely packed overlapping communities that are can be hard to engage, e.g for example, with low rates of English literacy. The Highlands and Islands communities are geographically dispersed and isolated and are strongly motivated to innovate by the difficulties challenges they face in terms of communications and access.
The Leapfrog team includes experts in evaluation, digital tool design, engagement and social media. Working across these two locations will stress test our new consultation approaches and helpto make them more robust when applied in other parts of the UK.
Our consultation tools will be used by communities directly. They will also be exchanged with other communities who will be encouraged to appropriate and adapt these tools to fitfor their own needs. Tools could be physical, digitally downloaded from www.leapfrog.tools and printed or entirely digital in nature. Leapfrog will develop these new approaches through a process of co-design and collaboration with communities and public sector partners where all parties play an active role in the creative process.
Jennifer Milligan, Lancaster City Council:
As the council’s consultation and engagement officer I was very keen to be involved in this project. Co-designing innovative, creative and practical tools helps the council in a climate of ever reducing resources to actively engage with our community, and build capacity within communities to carry out their own community engagement.
Leon Cruickshank, Principal Investigator, ImaginationLancaster: By helping people to be creative in their own way, we mean not attempting to get them to be creative in the same way that designers are creative. We aspire to facilitate public sector workers, community groups and 3rd sector groups to modify, and in time create their own tools to help them learn, communicate, and be creative with their own and other peoples’ creative languages.
Paul Smith Co-Investigator GSA:
The leapfrog project is a great example of where design practice has innovated into new areas and is helping to support change and greater inclusion for society. We will see how design can contribute to greater autonomy for citizens and how it can enhance ways for individuals to play active roles in decisions that affect them.
Tom Inns, Director of the Glasgow School of Art:
This timely project will be lookinglooks at the strategies that can be developed for creative facilitation within community groups, and in particular the role of co-design approaches. There is considerable interest in all governments into how innovation in public services can be encouraged. Consultation and co-design with service users is clearly critical in any innovation. The Leapfrog project will provide timely insights into how this might work with different communities across the UK.