Welcome To Public Space.

PublicSpace is a collaboration of researchers with design and video professionals.   We enable university research teams to communicate research insight to wider public, professional and policy audiences.

Prior to founding PublicSpace in 2005, five members of the team worked on research and public engagement projects at Lancaster University - within the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), later the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy (IEPPP), within the Institute for Health Research (IHR), and within the Department of Linguistics, the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre (LRC) and the Centre for Language in Social Life (CLSL).

“We set up PublicSpace after the familiar experience as researchers of an important dissemination being left to the end of a project, and then being abandoned as not feasible.  It let down the communities and the contributors who had given so much to the project.  It meant that insights from a major research project were not available to inform the subsequent government reports.

We set out to develop practical and intellectual expertise in research communication, and explore ways to overcome the barriers.  We now help research teams to make sure it can happen - whether in workshops, in print, online and/or through video.  Video is particularly effective because it can be filmed at key moments in the research before the contracted researchers and participants leave the project.

Our first video was submitted as one of the two ‘nominated outputs’ from the research to the ESRC; an acknowledgement of its combined intellectual and communicative value.  (The project was subsequently graded 'Outstanding' in its ESRC End of Award evaluation.)

Then as now, the reactions to our work confirm how important the quality of research communication is for the research team as well as for informing policy, practice and debate.”

From 2009 new collaborations have increased the expertise and the capacity within PublicSpace to communicate and support research through video, graphics and design.

PublicSpace is based in Keele, Lancaster and the Lake District.  As a registered not-for-profit organisation, PublicSpace can be a named partner within EC FP7 funded research, or a named supplier within projects funded by UK research councils, or alternatively simply contracted.