Besides research, one of the things I’m supposed to be doing as a Marie Curie research fellow is learning new things. Of course, that’s a good thing to be doing regardless of what other things you do, but in the case of the fellowship, it’s expected of me by the funder that I spend my time in Dublin doing things that will help me develop myself and my career prospects. I’ve already learned quite a few useful new things through my research work here, but I’ve also attended a number of training courses and workshops on various topics, and last week I had the opportunity to go to a particularly interesting one dealing with engaged research.

I learned about the workshop from the education and public engagement manager of the Insight Centre, who sent me an email about it and recommended that I sign up. I wasn’t previously familiar with the concept of engaged research, but as I was reading the description of the workshop, it soon became clear that it applies to quite a few, perhaps most, of the research projects I’ve been involved in over the course of my career so far. The gist of how this concept is defined is that it describes research where the individuals or organisations for whom the research is relevant are engaged to be involved in it, not merely as recipients of the eventual results but as co-creators of them. In my case the engaged partners have mostly come from industry, but they could also represent the public sector, civil society or the general public.

The workshop was facilitated by people from Campus Engage, a network that aims to “promote civic and community engagement as a core function of Higher Education on the island or Ireland”. Since Finnish universities have had social influence as their so-called third mission (research and education being the first two) for quite a years now, this statement also rings very familiar. A few days before the workshop, we were requested to fill out a survey with questions about our background and what sort of lessons we were particularly hoping to take home, which the facilitators then used to tailor the content to the interests of those attending the training.

A whole day of training can get very boring if it’s not well planned and executed, but there was no such problem here, as the presentations given by the facilitators were interspersed with discussions of our own questions and experiences, as well as small group activities. The latter involved, for example, studying an extract from a research project proposal and coming up with ways to improve it in terms of stakeholder engagement. One of the things I was hoping the training would give me was information and ideas on how to develop the engagement aspect of my own proposals, and this certainly qualified, although strictly speaking it was perhaps more of a cautionary example of how it’s not meant to be done. We did get more constructive planning tools as well, such as the logic model, a way of planning for long-term impact by laying out the path there as a series of if-then relationships starting with an analysis of the current situation.

Another thing about the workshop that I enjoyed was that we discussed some actual real-world cases of community engagement in action. A particularly interesting one was Access Earth, a mobile app that can be used by people with accessibility needs to find and rate hotels and restaurants by criteria such as accessible parking and wide doors. Clearly the key to successful implementation and deployment of such an application is engaging the people who are going to use it, both to get the design right and to collect the data on the accessibility of various places around the world, and one of the facilitators of the workshop has been working on the project as a community engagement advisor. The app is available worldwide, so the potential impact on the lives of people with disabilities is big – an inspiring example of what engagement is in practice and what it can accomplish.