Leads:
  • ATU
  • NCAD
Partners:
  • Department for Communities NI
  • DPER
  • North West Community Network
  • The Liberties Community Project

Co-Production for
Community-Led Public Services

Designing inclusive, community-led public services through 
co-production with communities, government agencies and citizens, using service design and socially-engaged arts practice.

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Question

How can community-led services increase inclusion and sustainable development?

Question

What role can art and design methods play in enabling communities to co-produce public services?

Question

How do we move from consultation to genuine co-production in service design?

Doctoral Researchers

  • Frank Sweeney is an artist with a research-based practice, using found material to approach questions of collective memory, experience and identity through film and sound. Recent awards include the Tiger Shorts Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Common Ground’s MARKING 25 Commission, the Arts Council’s Next Generation Award & a 3 Year Studio at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios.

    The Airwaves For The People

    My research will examine community self-organisation through the lens of community organised media. The starting point will involve extensive research on illegal pirate and community television stations in Ireland. There will be a particular focus on stations structured on a non-profit co-operative model, self-organised and led by the communities themselves. These stations existed from the mid 70s until the early 2000s and broadcast news programs, local ads, DIY soap operas, regional sports events and lots more during these years. These stations are rich examples of community self-organisation and community-led media services.
    Frank Sweeney
    Frank Sweeney

  • Lisa Hallinan has been working in the community, creative and sustainability sectors for over 20 years. Her expertise encompasses community co-design and cultural development, event management and communications. With a Master’s in Arts Policy and Practice from the University of Galway, she recently worked with the Arts Council and Create.

    Designing Together: Co-Producing the Conditions for Effective Community-Led Public Service Delivery within Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Placemaking contexts

    This proposal will investigate how community led co design practices can be structured to co produce the conditions for effective, sustainable public service delivery by social enterprises, producing a transferable framework, practical tools and policy recommendations that strengthen democratic participation, enhance service effectiveness and empower communities to own local service delivery, with an empirical focus on Killala Town Centre and its early initiatives in cultural heritage, placemaking and related community led activities.

    It will examine what organisational and governance structures best support community leadership, asking how participatory design processes empower community ownership, strengthen social cohesion, ensure sustainability and facilitate decision-making and what barriers hinder meaningful co-production. It will explore pathways towards overcoming these barriers and how practice-based research can contribute to sustainable public service innovation.
    Lisa Hallinan
    Lisa Hallinan

Research Supervisors/Project Co-Leads

  • Caoimhe leads the MA and Professional Diploma Service Design, and Design Lab: Civic. Her work focuses on public sector service design, and the role of life-centred design approaches in improving citizen experiences. She is particularly interested in how co-design approaches, collaborative sense-making, and experience prototyping can be embedded within public sector organisations to support service transformation.

    Caoimhe McMahon NCAD
    Caoimhe McMahon

  • Cróna O’Donoghue is a lecturer in the Department of Design and Creative Media at Atlantic Technological University, Donegal and co-founder of design firm ODDesign. Her professional background incorporates design, curation, event and arts management, and community engagement. She is currently completing her PhD in CSM, University of Arts London.

    Cróna O’Donoghue ATU
    Cróna O’Donoghue

  • Dr. Isobel Cunningham is a Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Atlantic Technological University. Her research and professional interests focus on entrepreneurship education, inclusive entrepreneurship, social enterprise development and growth, and the ways in which social entrepreneurs build and leverage social capital. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Cunningham actively collaborates with government and industry bodies that support SMEs and the social enterprise sector.

    Isobel Cunningham ATU
    Isobel Cunningham

  • Tom O’Dea is an artist who works with mixed-media sculpture and participatory practice to explore ways how different forms of knowledge impact upon our ways of acting and being the world. His work interrogates the political implications of knowledge production, practices of computation and organisation in contemporary society. Tom is a lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.

    He co-chairs the Network Ecologies research theme at CONNECT - Ireland’s SFI Centre for future networks at Trinity College. He is also a member of the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG), an artist-research group, is one of the organisers of Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA) and a steering committee member of community radio station Dublin Digital Radio (ddr).
    Tom O’Dea NCAD
    Tom O’Dea

Partners

  • The Department for Communities (DfC) has strategic responsibility for equality, anti-poverty, sports, arts and culture, languages, finding employment, historic environment, housing, regeneration, benefits and pensions, community and voluntary sector development, social legislation and child support in Northern Ireland.

    www.communities-ni.gov.uk
  • DPER logo

    The Department works from the centre of Government to drive the delivery of better public services, living standards and infrastructure for the people of Ireland.

    www.gov.ie
  • North West Community Network logo

    NWCN is a membership organisation whose role is to support and develop its members and the community sector within the Derry/Strabane area. We strengthen and build capacity within the sector as well as facilitating collaboration to advocate and lobby on behalf of members and the sector on pertinent community issues. We do a lot of cross-sectoral work and in partnership with others e.g. University, Ideas Fund initiative and our supporting minority ethnic communities project.

    www.nwcn.org

  • The Liberties Community Project is an amalgamation of SICCDA and Robert Emmet CDP- two South West Inner City Dublin community development organisations established in 1982 and 2003 respectively.

    thelibertiescommunityproject.ie