We want 1 million people to directly benefit from new adaptations of Leapfrog tools by unlocking the potential for practitioners across the UK and beyond to work at new scales. We will build on the success of the Leapfrog project by working with new public and third sector partners to help them engage with large groups. This will range from community meetings with hundreds of people through to some interactions that will have over 100,000 people using an adapted Leapfrog tool in a Design Week. To do this we will use co-design to collaboratively create and adapt Leapfrog tools with our partners, giving them tailored resources to support their work, and producing shareable tools available freely worldwide. Amongst the many challenges faced by the public sector at this time, there is a growing need to meaningfully involve more and more citizens, service users and communities in the difficult decisions that affect them. Scaling Up Leapfrog responds to this need by enabling our partners to directly take on the challenges that surround engaging hundreds of thousands of people in meaningful, creative dialogue. With our partners we will co-design Leapfrog tools to support engagement with 80-100 people at a time, a significant shift in scale from common engagement practice that generally engages ten or twenty people at a time. We will also collaborate with our partners to unlock new scales for parallel engagement, producing Leapfrog tools that help form connections between multiple events in a single initiative. Our partners range from those in public health (Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group), to national charity networks (Food Power), international design networks (World Design Weeks Network) and museums (Victoria and Albert Museum). These partners each seek to enable their staff to perform effective, creative engagement with an increasing number of participants. For some of our partners this is driven by a desire to make a population more health aware and to develop a social movement to that end, engaging with the most disadvantaged people and helping their voices have an effect in decision-making or to help eradicate food poverty by drawing on the expertise of people living in food poverty. We also have 'reach partners' who are working with very large numbers of people (e.g. Milan Design Week had over 400,000 attendees in 2018), we will work with the heads of 10 design weeks to develop new tools to help them engage with their audiences en-mass. We will use co-design to collaboratively design and test ways of enabling these new scales of engagement for our partners, giving them direct value during the project, and on-going value as new practices and resources becoming part of their organisational vocabulary. Our approach to the co-design of tools is exemplified in a stream of work from the current Leapfrog project (2015-2018) We co-designed with 20 librarians to help make this transition to mixed-service teams and spaces a more positive experience. Being led by them, together we developed a range of tools to help new teams form and function effectively. In Scaling up Leapfrog, one could imagine a tool being adapted from the Librarians 'New team tools' to help people explore the contents of a design week collaboratively; this could be incorporated into the tickets created for the design week. Its very important to note though, our experience is that the real insights come from actually co-designing with partners, the real outcomes of the co-design process are likely to be unexpected and all the more innovative for that. The new practices, tools and resources that are produced through co-design with our project partners will also have relevance across a diverse range of organisations, sectors and contexts. All the tools produced by the project will be shared freely through the Leapfrog website (www.leapfrog.tools), building on a library of free, resources available (and used) worldwide.

This project will be a collaboration with community partners to co-design and evaluate new approaches to consultation. Consultation, the engagement of communities in public service decision making becoming an increasingly important part of local and regional life, with moves to help communities be more active and connected to their wider environment. This encouragement of ground up activity reflects a groundswell of new community, friends and special interests groups forming across the UK. It is also recognised by national government with legislation such as the Localism Bill (2011) laying out a sweeping agenda for empowering communities, e.g. giving residents the power to instigate local referendums on any local issue. Public bodies have always been involved in consultation with their communities and there is a strong desire for this to increase in the future and to support communities in playing a larger, more active role in society. This need (and desire) for more consultation coincides in dramatic reductions of Council funding. In the last 3 months one of the public sector partner departments we work with has been reduced from 22 to 4 people. Clearly new consultation practices are needed to accommodate both the opportunity presented by the demand for more consultation and a quite different funding landscape. Leapfrog will help create and evaluate these new models, working initially with test beds in Lancashire and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and then more broadly across the UK. Lancashire has closely packed overlapping communities that are hard to engage, e.g. with low rates of English literacy. The Highlands and Islands communities are very geographically dispersed and isolated and are strongly motivated to innovate by the hardships they face in terms of communications and access. Working across these two test-beds will stress test our new consultation approaches and help make them more robust when applied in other parts of the UK. We will develop these new approaches through a process of co-design. This involves collaboration with communities and public sector partners where all parties play an active role in the creative process (Cruickshank et al 2013). Communities will engage in a co-design process that results in a range of new consultation tools that specifically meet their local needs. For us a tool is something that, with skill, can be used to make wonderful, diverse, creative things (just like a real physical tool). In this proposal we are developing tools to help all people create their own amazing consultation processes. 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 fit their own needs. Tools could be physical, digitally downloaded and printed or entirely digital in nature. We will use these tools to develop toolboxes containing a themed set of tools (e.g. consultation without writing, for groups with low levels of English literacy). We will produce at least 50 of each of the 5 toolboxes we produce. We will seed these toolboxes in at least 80 communities and public sector bodies across the UK. Underpinning all our actions, from co-design to innovation in local consultation to widely distributed toolboxes will be a series of new evaluation frameworks. These will be used to understand the real value and impact of the new tools. With strong guidance from Gareth Williams, our applied ethicist, these evaluation frameworks will be designed to be unobtrusive but also to examine activities in terms that make sense and are seen as valuable to communities. Rather than evaluation being something that is 'done to' communities this will also be a collaborative, mutually beneficial shared process. Cruickshank, Coupe and Hennessy, 'Co-Design: Fundamental Issues And Guidelines For Designers: Beyond the Castle Case Study', Swedish Design Research Journal no 2, 2013. page 4