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.
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 Dan Lockton, Senior Research Associate at the Helen Hamlyn Centre, RCA, reflects upon research cultures in academia and design practice, the particular approach of design in relation to behaviour change and identifies local councils and communities as groups he is particularly interested in engaging with more in his research.
Dan also made a short position statement on civic participation:
Dr Cat Rossi in Senior Lecturer in Design History at Kingston University, London. In this interview she reviews how understanding past patterns in design history can be beneficial to cross-disciplinary, design-oriented research. She draws from her extensive research on radical Italian design of the late-1960s and early 1970s.
In this short video interview, Dr Tim Schwanen, Departmental Lecturer in Transport Studies and Human Geography at the University of Oxford, talks about how design orientated research might engage more with the concept of temporality, the obstacles in developing research into policy and the contribution of the arts and humanities to his research field.
We also asked Tim to make a position statement in response to one of our core themes. He chose mobilities:
For our second video interview, we asked Dr Rachel Aldred, Senior Lecturer in Transport at the University of Westminster, to tell us about her research, the process of seeing research through to impact policy and the challenges in working as a sociologist within a transport department.
We also asked Rachel to make a short position statement response to one of our four themes (civic participation; public space; health and well-being and mobilities). She chose mobilities.
We invite researchers from any background to join us in a two-day ‘sprint’ workshop which will bring together practitioners and researchers from the arts and humanities and other domains, who share an interest in using academic research to address collective and public challenges.
The workshop will be held at Lancaster University on April 16-17. It forms part of Developing participation in social design: Prototyping projects, programmes and policies, a project commissioned by the AHRC which aims to prototype new kinds of research collaboration oriented towards achieving societal change and collective outcomes. We anticipate research themes in several areas, examples of which are listed in the EoI call document (link below). Selected research consortia, who form and iterate their ideas through the sprint workshop, will have the opportunity to apply through a targeted call for Project Development Awards of up to £15,000 (fEC).
Further information from AHRC website: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Pages/Open-Call-for-applications-to-attend-the-ProtoPublics-Sprint-Workshop.aspx
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