Despite the potential benefits of a location on the coast, many port and coastal towns and cities are run-down and unattractive, and underperform in economic and social wellbeing terms. This is often a result of a poor built environment, derelict industrial and other legacy sites, and a lack of meaningful connectivity between the urban realm, green spaces and the waterfront. Rising sea levels and coastal erosion pose further, existential, threats. These issues are common to port and coastal cities and towns all around the UK, hence transcend simplistic north/south or east/west categorisation or division. Addressing them through effective, sustainable and resilient regeneration is essential to the UK Government's Net Zero and Levelling Up agenda. Our Network+ will use concepts developed by UKCRIC on Flourishing Systems. We will take a systems-based, people-focussed view of infrastructure; keeping people at the centre of the vision, considering infrastructure as a way of connecting together interdependent systems, which must be designed to be sustainable, inclusive, secure and resilient. The complexity of the component systems, and the heterogeneity of drivers and foci, makes it difficult to optimise the infrastructure system of systems, even generally, towards a better future. We will adopt the Line of Sight approach, which involves actively facilitating different communities (people, experts, authorities, government, investors) to understand their current and potential priorities and roles; then to explore and develop synergies focused on new, common objectives along aligned lines of sight. The activities of the Network+ will be organised through five interdependent strands: 1. Celebrating the major asset: connecting the town/city with the waterfront, balancing the needs of a functional waterfront with ambience, public accessibility, leisure and heritage 2. Inclusive infrastructure: engaging with communities, policymakers, the public sector and business to ensure effective infrastructure development and use 3. Maintaining and enhancing resilience: making port and coastal city and town regeneration resilient to climate change, sea-level rise, coastal erosion and flooding 4. Coastal region transport: addressing issues associated with the particular challenges of transport to/from and within port and coastal cities and towns arising from linear development along the coast or estuary, a current or former working waterfront, and the absence of up to half the hinterland 5. Nature inspired, human scale engineering: including greening the grey infrastructure, to provide/enhance social value for the surrounding communities Extensive use will be made of testbed sites, with three having been selected as typifying a range of UK port and coastal city and town regeneration needs and issues. These are the port city of Southampton, Lancaster and Morecambe, and North Norfolk seaside towns including Cromer and Sheringham.

This project seeks to establish DESIS-UK, as a national multidisciplinary network of individuals and organisations exploring design-led social innovation and sustainability, and to identify and agree its aims and objectives and ways of working, in collaboration with stakeholders. It aims to strengthen connections between design academics, design practitioners, and end users of design from public, private and third sector organisations and the communities they serve, to explore how best to employ design thinking and skills to deliver sustain-able social and environmental benefits to communities. DESIS-UK will be developed to interface with the International DESIS Network founded by Ezio Manzini (http://www.desis-network.org ) which is a network of global, regional and local design 'labs', comprised of teams of professors, researchers and students active in the promotion and delivery of design led social inno-vation for sustainability. The DESIS International network is decentralised, operating via regional nodes and local hubs, and acts to "Foster social innovation and sustainability by taking part in support projects and programs, gathering together and offering greater visibility to significant cases. Promoting design for social innovation both within and out-side the design community, developing appropriate design tools and organizing cultural and pedagogic activities. Fostering the circulation of ideas and experiences, with a peer-to-peer approach, between the different DESIS-Local initiatives to carrying out comparative research and co-producing courses at an international level." DESIS-UK network will constitute a DESIS-Local initiative and further to its creation seek to be active in: - Proposing and developing national and international research programs. - Organizing pedagogic initiatives (eg workshops, seminars, courses and conference) - Preparing pedagogic resources (eg teaching tools, course formats, bibliographic references). - Collecting and disseminating research information (eg case studies, projects and research results). - Promoting cultural and communication initiatives (eg exhibitions, publications and broadcasts). A series of 3 workshops will bring together academics, practitioners, and community end users of design (typically third sector organisations) to build UK capacity for design-led social innovation by creating connections, harvesting knowledge/ experience and exchanging and reviewing existing best practices. As well as being disseminated internationally via the existing DESIS website, the outcomes of these workshops will be discussed and documented online through a dedicated DESIS-UK webspace to be created as part of this project. Specifically, workshops will seek to; - Share and map current project cases, reviewing themes and approaches. - Map and connect disciplinary specialisms and skills amongst individuals and organisations within a DESIS-UK network. - Connect end users of design and research with researchers and student groups within academia to facilitate research, teaching and practice of design led social innovation nationwide. - Connect students and academia with the professional world to augment career opportunities, and the pedagogic requirements to support them. - Disseminate exemplars to the UK Network to share learning and inspire local and national initiatives. - Create visions/opportunities for future projects/research. This proposal aligns with the current highlight notice for Connected Communities in that it supports the three underpinning cross-cutting themes identified within the Connected Communities summit in Glasgow, July 2011, namely: - Connectivity within & between communities - Connecting research on communities - Connecting research with communities - & "enhanced harvesting" of research benefitting communities.

Why do consumers continue to purchase plastic packaging products, even when they have real concerns for the environment and tend to feel positively about more sustainable solutions? How do supply chain actors respond to consumer attitudes & behaviours in relation to the use of plastic packaging? How can we implement enhanced waste management strategies which go beyond conventional plastic packaging solutions? Focusing on the food sector, we aim to answer such questions by developing a better understanding of plastic packaging throughout the whole supply chain, from production to consumption to post-consumption. If industry and policy are to have any realistic chance of significantly reducing plastic wastage in the UK and abroad, a thorough understanding of the functions of plastic packaging in consumers' lives is needed. However, this understanding needs to be connected to business and waste management practices, to tackle key pinch points inhibiting the drive toward cleaner, greener growth. The interdisciplinary research will be a collaborative effort between researchers at Lancaster University (from the Management School, the Department of Chemistry, the Materials Science Institute) and an extensive network of industry partners, including: supermarkets (Waitrose - UK Plastic Pact consortium member & Booths); food suppliers (Bells of Lazonby & Butlers Larder); next generation packaging producers (BioTech Services Ltd); professional industry networks (Chartered Institute of Waste Management & Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining); waste management companies (Preston Plastics & Precious plastic); and local councils (Lancaster City Council). We take a mixed-method approach, drawing on archival data, ethnographic techniques, multi-case study analysis, action-based research, mixed-desk and field-based research, to explore multiple perspectives on plastic packaging in the food sector. This research speaks directly to the UK's Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging (SSPP) Challenge objectives and UK Plastic PACT 2025 targets. Working with stakeholders along the supply chain, this research will provide valuable insights to increase collaboration and shared understanding along the UK food plastic packaging supply chain in order to create a sense of shared responsibility and improved packaging options. The novelty of this project is that it gathers insights from consumers and their plastic packaging consumption and disposal, but also brings those insights to supply chain stakeholders (producers, retailers, re-users and waste management organisations) and in so doing, develops a detailed and rich understanding of how the attitude-behaviour gap can be addressed. This would allow the team to develop practical guidance on ways to influence people's packaging behaviour. Specifically, we will provide guidance on ways that producers can influence consumers in this domain, to provide consumers with more sustainable and attractive packaging alternatives, or redesign products/operational processes that promote resource productivity and avoid plastic waste. We will also develop guidance for post-consumer packaging organisations on consumer attitudes and discarded plastic packaging indicating drivers, barriers and opportunities for alternative plastic packaging (reusable, recyclable or compostable), effective recycling, and further investment in material recapture. For a more circular, sustainable model of manufacturing, consumption and disposal centred on next generation packaging to be developed, we need this detailed analysis of consumer behaviour around packaging, alongside a deep understanding of business and waste management practices. This holistic view of plastic packaging in people's lives will drive cleaner, greener growth.

This project aims to help young people understand how climate change will shape the future of Morecambe Bay and the communities that inhabit it. By bringing together information on past and future coastal changes, and personal histories, this project will reflect on alternative futures and different ways to build community preparedness to environmental challenges. Current predictions show the significant impact that sea level rise and extreme weather events will have on coastal areas worldwide. However, what exactly will happen to individual coastal communities will vary greatly, and will largely depend on local geology, climate, infrastructures and community preparedness. Shoreline management plans presenting regional risk assessment and strategies are available, but the specialised formats and the language used in these documents make them effectively inaccessible to the public. In addition, these documents disregard the perspectives of coastal communities, and the tacit knowledge developed by people who have been affected by flooding and weather events in the past. Collecting localised knowledge and making it readable to the lay public is essential both to understand the impact of climate change in specific places and to inform local policies and public participation in decision making. In this project, students at Lancaster Our Lady's College, Morecambe Bay Academy, Carnforth High School, and Lancaster and Morecambe College will work with researchers in design, computing, and environmental science to create visualisations of place-specific coastal pasts and futures based on an innovative interdisciplinary methodology that brings together predictive models, citizen science, and ethnographic approaches. These visualisations will be presented as reels of stereographs accompanied by zines (also produced by the students) telling stories of coastal pasts and futures. They will reveal stories, questions, and images co-produced by researchers and young people, based on data collected in the first stage of the project. Each zine will feature a map indicating the coastal location of the stereoscope to use for bringing the visualisations to life. When looked at through the corresponding stereoscope, the images printed on the reel will appear as tri-dimensional visualisations. A sensor will also activate an audio track with sounds, stories, and critical questions for the audience. These audio-visual 'Timescapes' will be displayed during a Coastal Futures Festival as site-specific installations, which will enable members of the public to look at their surroundings through the lenses of costal change. This is an innovative approach, which enables students to design and produce the tools that are used to create immersive visualisations. The project appropriates the optical and mechanical tools of stereoscopy for a novel, creative purpose. No programming, proprietary software, or expensive equipment will be necessary, and young people will have full control over the whole process. As part of the Coastal Futures Festival, students will be engaged in a programme of talks and events in which they will share their visualisations with local councils, and environmental groups, including Environment Agency, North West Coastal Group & Forum, Heysham Heritage Centre, Lancashire Archives, and Lancaster City Council. The event will act as a catalyst for conversations on local futures and the role that public and professional bodies and members of the community can play in planning for response and adaptation to climate change, showing clear pathways for how young people can play an active role in these processes.

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.