Celia Lury, ESRC Professorial Fellow and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, made a provocation presentation entitled ‘Developing participation in social design, suspending the social?’ at the AHRC ProtoPublics Sprint Workshop on the 16 April. She has very kindly shared the slides from her talk with us here: Social design
Helena Almeida, Inhabited Painting, 1975.
Before, during and just after the ProtoPublics workshop there was activity on twitter, mostly by researchers invited to attend and/or by the organisers (Guy Julier, Leah Armstrong and me).
During the workshop at Lancaster on April 16-17, some of these people were live tweeting including with photographs. So I thought I’d do a grab from Twitter in order to preserve these dialogues.
The ProtoPublics Sprint Workshop took place at Imagination Lancaster on 16-17 April. A group of 45 researchers- crossing disciplines and practices- got together to test out and explore new methods of ‘doing’ socially engaged design research. Here are some photographs to document the day.
ProtoPublics Sprint Workshop Program
Our principles for the workshop: Agile; Participatory; Collaborative; Creative; Reflexive
Participants were asked to arrange their ‘assets’ on the tables to connect and expand upon our core themes: mobilities; civic participation; health and well-being; public space.
From this collection of assets, participants could identify interests, priorities and expertise of others in the workshop.
From here, participants self-organised into groups to discuss common interests. They were encouraged to move between groups over the course of the two days before fixing on one group with which to put forward a research project pitch.
The workshop ended with creative project pitches, some of which took us outside the Imagination Lancaster building.
Nicola Hughes, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Government, took part in the final provocation discussion with Cat Macauley, head of user research and engagement in the Scottish government at the ProtoPublics sprint workshop. In this video interview, Nicola describes the changing approach to policy making in the UK and articulates the role for design and designers within this.
Sue Ball, Director at Media Arts Partnership (MAP) in Leeds, gave the first provocation paper at our ProtoPublics Sprint Workshop on 16 April in Lancaster, which took the form of a conversation with Professor Guy Julier. In this short video interview, filmed directly after the provocation, Sue elaborates on the strategies she has used in working with local councils and Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) to deliver social change.
Dr Aylish Wood, Reader in film studies at the University of Kent, sent us this video in which she discusses the relationships between software, big data and social space. Aylish also reflects upon some of the ways in which software design could impact methodologies and practices in her research field.
ProtoPublics 