Abstract
This chapter explores co-production with community groups of innovative digital technologies designed to address challenging social issues. It presents lessons learned from the Catalyst project (http://www.catalystproject.org.uk), which carried out 13 such co-production projects over a three year period developing digital solutions in areas as diverse as homelessness, anxiety management, behaviour change, and renewable energy. The approach taken was to form meaningful partnerships of multidisciplinary academics and external partners from community groups. The chapter offers guidelines for how to make such partnerships effective based on the Catalyst experience. These guidelines cover a range of different areas: working in the community, research innovation, working across disciplines, and practicalities. They are illustrated, where appropriate, by reference to a range of research partnerships set up as part of the Catalyst project.
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Notes
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For more details on all projects see http://www.catalystproject.org.uk.
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Acknowledgements
The research presented in this paper would not be possible without the selfless and dedicated community groups, social enterprises, charities, local authorities and individuals who believed in the projects and put their time and expertise into them. In total, Catalyst worked with around 90 such organisations—too many to name individually—in a range of different capacities, from exploratory, through advisory, to collaborative projects. We deeply thank all of them.
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Whittle, J., Ferrario, M.A., Simm, W. (2020). Community-University Research: A Warts and All Account. In: Chamberlain, A., Crabtree, A. (eds) Into the Wild: Beyond the Design Research Lab. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18020-1_7
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