The project focuses on making and doing together through creative collaborations with arts and creative industry partners and is supported by Limerick’s new Citizen Innovation Lab and Fab Lab Limerick. It’s one of the 15 projects funded by Creative Ireland through its €2 million Creative Climate Action Fund, which focuses on bringing a creative approach to illustrating and making the changes needed to fight climate change.
Creativity, collaboration, decarbonisation
Each group will explore an aspect of decarbonisation that matters to them through a creative collaboration with arts and creative industry partners. The project will focus on making and doing together to enable behaviour change towards decarbonisation in Limerick.
Project implementation will begin with a series of information events and drop-in days at Limerick’s new Citizen Innovation Lab. Then, following a call for expressions of interest shared by Limerick’s Public Participation Network, five communities of interest or of place will be selected to participate. These groups will be invited to learn about Limerick’s plans for decarbonisation and to identify a decarbonisation challenge relevant to their day-to-day lives. These challenges will form the basis of an open call for arts and creative industry partners to work with each community to address their challenge, drawing on a range of creative skills.
The Decarbonising Together project will be based at Limerick City and County Council’s Citizen Innovation Lab, a new space in Limerick for observation, co-creation and experimentation, where digital tools – e.g. the city energy model and community mapping tool – and non-digital tools and processes can support collaboration. Successful participants can also access Fab Lab Limerick, a maker space and digital fabrication laboratory run by the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick and co-located with the Citizen Innovation Lab on Sarsfield Street.
The five creative outputs of Decarbonising Together will be shared within the networks of participating communities and with the wider community of Limerick. A record of each collaboration will be stored on Limerick City and County Council’s cloud-based digital Citizen Innovation Lab, creating an open record of knowledge and learning to support dissemination and broader replication in Limerick and beyond.
Implementation of the Decarbonising Together project will commence in November 2021 and continue to December 2022. The project builds on the community-led open innovation approach to community engagement and co-creation developed through the +CityxChange H2020 Research and Innovation project. +CityxChange is currently underway in Limerick and explores how cities can become carbon neutral by 2050.
Decarbonising Together is supported by partners from across different areas of research and academia: UL’s School of Architecture/Fab Lab Limerick as well as the UL Department of Economics, research and design collective Space Engagers, creative studio Colaborativa.eu, and Limerick City and County Council.
Find out more about the Creative Climate Action Fund projects.
