Designing the Small Democracy of Rathlin Island

Northern Ireland's divided society faces a persistent challenge: governmental instability and, frequently, absence. Even when government is functioning, traditional top-down policymaking often fails to address complex issues from the lived experiences of its citizens.
Design for Policy (DfP) offers a transformative approach, reframing policymaking through innovative practices, models, and expertise. The absence of Government in Northern Ireland necessitates community-led policymaking. This research explores the potential of policymaking "from below", investigating how design can empower communities to actively participate in shaping their own futures, particularly relevant in Northern Ireland's context where collective action holds significant policy impact.
This PhD, centred on practice with a focus on the pragmatic application of DfP, established a space for agonistic policy dialogue. Drawing on Kaufman's [16] assertion that policy is realized through both rhetoric and action, and Dorst's [10] framing of design research as the concurrent creation of a "thing" and its "way of working," this study adopts a Research through Design (RtD) methodology. As Dixon [9] highlights, RtD projects engage with real-world contexts to effect positive transformations.
It involved a 10-month Democratic Mini-Public on Rathlin Island, utilising an approach based on Assemblage Theory that foreground the participative elements often overlooked in democratic processes [4]. Our deliberative democracy centred on the community's expressed wish to investigate their ferry service; which became a pragmatic design ‘device’; through which nearly all island-specific policy implementation happens.
This project aimed to prototype novel community-led democratic processes applicable across the island of Ireland. It also addresses gaps in the literature by:
foregrounding design methods within deliberative facilitation, exploring the transformative potential of design to enable deeper dialogue in these settings.
taking a political ethnography approach to observe what happens when politics is done ‘when everybody knows everybody’
By examining these interventions through the lenses of participatory design and agonism, this project aims to contribute methodologically to the application of design in democratic innovation research.