Future Island-Island Impact Cards: A tool to share emerging Practice as Research and pathways to impact in design-led, community engaged research.

Future Island-Island is one of four national flagship projects funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in collaboration with the Design Museum’s Future Observatory. These Green Transition Ecosystems (GTEs) are major initiatives that translate design-led research into practical, real-world applications integrating arts, humanities, and material innovation across multidisciplinary fields related to the green transition. Future Island-Island explores community-informed approaches to the green transition through co-design and place-based research. Working closely with the Rathlin Island community, as both lens and teacher, we explore diverse community ideas and approaches shaping a just green transition. The work is structured in two phases: (1) 2023–2025 and (2) 2025–2028, that inform circular economies that valourise waste, preserve heritage through digital technologies, and drive innovation in materials and services to support sustainable futures. The first edition includes 33 Practice as Research projects from phase 1, across the categories of Design Demonstrators in Action, Rathlin Creative Fellowships and Design Fellowships. They give voice to researchers across all stages of careers, within academia, public and private sector and community. These demonstrators are illustrated through Impact Cards, adapted from the Design Research for Change approach of Professor Paul Rodgers (Rodgers et al., 2022; Rodgers, 2024). The research dissemination extends to pop-up civic engagements and longer term exhibitions in museums and science discovery centres as open research fora, sharing iterative developments, indicative of design.