Can Creative Community Engagement Inspire Hope? Exploring Sustainability Challenges with Young People in Youth Settings Through a Design Thinking Lens.

Summary

In a time of escalating environmental crises, amid a backdrop of global political unrest, young people globally face unprecedented challenges that demand innovative and hopeful approaches to community engagement and sustainability. Northern Ireland is a post-conflict society, and youth work has long been an integral aspect of encouraging political community cohesion and peacebuilding (Harland, 2009). However, concerns over reduced youth work funding and ‘short termism’ highlights the continued need to engage young people in activities which encourage the imagining of better futures (Milliken, 2020). Leaning on this legacy of youth work, this innovative study situates the reimagining of hopeful futures within a sustainability lens. This study explores whether creative community engagement can foster hope among youth by addressing sustainability challenges through arts-based educational methodologies (Chappell and Cahnmann-Taylor, 2013). Using insights from the Future Island-Island Youth Programme, a transdisciplinary initiative focussed on Northern Ireland’s only inhabited offshore island, Rathlin Island, this study engages young people from Rathlin and other isolated coastal communities in sustainability discourse (Future Island-Island, 2025). This research examines how participatory, speculative, and utopian design processes can empower geographically isolated young people to envision and co-create sustainable futures.

The project focusses on building capacity within the youth sector by training and supporting youth leaders to deliver a co-designed youth programme. Through creative design thinking workshops, participatory mapping, and speculative storytelling, youth participants engage in critical problem-solving exercises that integrate civic literacy, environmental awareness, and social innovation (Dalsgaard, 2014; Panke & Harth, 2019). By making sustainability challenges tangible through creative processes, the project fosters a pedagogy of constructive hope (Bloch, 1986; Ojala, 2012) that transforms young people from passive recipients of climate anxiety into active agents of change.

This research contributes to youth and community engagement scholarship, demonstrating how arts-based educational research can mediate complex environmental issues and inspire local, hope-driven climate action. It is anticipated that findings will positively support that participatory, creative approaches not only strengthen environmental resilience. It is hoped that this can encourages young people to participate in future thinking beyond local cultural and political disparities, cultivating futures-thinking skills necessary for navigating the (post-) Anthropocene (IPCC, 2023). The project highlights scalable models for community engagement, advocating for education-driven participatory design as a tool to foster hope, agency, and sustainable innovation in youth settings. 


Theoretical Framework

This study is informed by three key theoretical perspectives:

Relationality & Entanglements (Barad, 2010; Pugh & Chandler, 2021) – Exploring how young people experience sustainability challenges through interconnected, place-based relationships.

Hope Theory & Utopian Thinking (Bloch, 1986; Levitas, 2010; Ojala, 2012) – Investigating how design-based interventions nurture positive future imaginaries amidst global climate anxiety.

Design Thinking for Youth Empowerment (Dalsgaard, 2014; Panke & Harth, 2019; To & Liu, 2021) – Examining how speculative and participatory design can facilitate youth agency, creativity, and civic engagement.

Embedded within the Future Island-Island programme, this approach is built on inclusivity, participation and stakeholder mapping to ensure involvement, collaborative learning and meaningful out. The goal is to develop models that can be replicated and scaled across other island communities and beyond. This research aligns with global efforts to integrate youth voices in sustainability discourse and demonstrates the potential of creative engagement as a transformative force in environmental education. 


Method

This study will employ a mixed-methods approach to explore how working in partnership with youth leaders, creative community engagement and design thinking methodologies can inspire hope among young people in addressing sustainability challenges. The research, which will be conducted between January-July 2025, integrates qualitative, participatory, and design-based methods to capture young people's experiences, perceptions, and creative solutions. The methods are structured to ensure youth agency, critical engagement, and iterative co-creation of sustainable futures. 1. Creative Design Activities & Speculative Prototyping Design thinking workshops serve as the core method for engaging young people in problem-solving sustainability challenges. Participants work in teams to identify environmental issues, ideate solutions, and develop speculative designs—ranging from drawings and models to digital prototypes. By externalising abstract sustainability challenges into tangible representations, these activities stimulate hopeful future imaginaries and enhance youth agency in solution-building. 2. Participatory Mapping & Relationality Diagrams Youth participants create relational maps illustrating their understanding of sustainability entanglements within their communities. These maps visually depict their connections to people, places, and environmental concerns, helping researchers analyse how young people conceptualise sustainability and relationality. 3. Focus Group Interviews with Youth & Youth Workers Two sets of focus group interviews will be conducted. The first will engage youth participants to discuss their experiences of design thinking, sustainability engagement, and whether their participation influenced their perspectives on hope and agency. The second will ask youth workers trained in design thinking methodologies during the project to reflect on the effectiveness and feasibility of these approaches in youth work settings, offering critical insights on how creative engagement translates into educational and civic impact. 4. Surveys & Questionnaires for Quantitative Analysis A structured questionnaire will assess participants' digital literacy, climate awareness, and perceived empowerment post-workshop. This will complement qualitative data, offering measurable insights into how design-based community engagement fosters hope and agency. This transdisciplinary research framework ensures a holistic understanding of how design thinking methodologies shape young people’s engagement with sustainability and their ability to imagine hopeful futures.


Expected Outcomes

Young people face unprecedented challenges that demand innovative and hopeful approaches to community engagement and sustainability. In Northern Ireland, a post-conflict society, youth-work has historically contributed to community cohesion and peacebuilding (Harland, 2009). This presentation aims to explore how youth-work can encourage young people to respond to sustainability issues. By situating the reimagining of futures within a sustainability lens and using creative and participatory methods, we explore the role of creative engagement in fostering hope among youth. This study will draw on insights from the Future Island-Island Youth Programme, a transdisciplinary initiative focused on Rathlin Island and other isolated coastal communities in Northern Ireland. This research examines how design thinking methodologies—including speculative, participatory, and utopian design processes—empower young people to envision and co-create sustainable futures. The research uses creative arts-based methods to provide accessible platforms for geographically marginalised youth to express their perspectives on environmental challenges. These methods align with the call's emphasis on arts-based techniques that support culturally sensitive and contextually relevant research, breaking down barriers to participation and valuing marginalised voices. This presentation will highlight the complexity of perspectives that emerge through multimodal literacies, illustrating how young people’s designs can reflect authentic realities while exploring sustainability and climate change. It also addresses how participation in co-creation processes, in partnership with external stakeholders can influence power asymmetries, examining how relationships between researchers, youth-workers, youth and community members evolve. By reflecting on participant perspectives, engagement and entanglements within the design process, the research hopes to offer insights into how meaningful participation can produce innovative and socially relevant research outcomes. Finally, we anticipate that this project will offer a scalable model for participatory research in community education and youth-work by exploring the potential of creative community engagement through arts-based education fostering hope, empowerment, and innovative solutions to sustainability challenges.


References

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