Asset based community development (ABCD) is a powerful approach being used with a diverse network of communities and community organizations across the Connected Communities programme to help uncover and utilize their hidden potential, their tangible resources (such as spaces, services and infrastructures) and intangible qualities (such as creative talents, skills, knowledge and social capital). Asset mapping has been deployed as a community engagement, research methodology and co-design tool seeking to enable groups to communicate stories, concerns and achievements but also to generate a shared vision and identify areas for development (personal, economic, environmental, cultural and social). Through a combination of discussion methods with creative techniques (participatory cartography, filmaking, visual art and storytelling, gaming, digital media and theatre performance), asset mapping has been used to trigger creative responses as well as creatively document, visualize and enable collective action, which could potentially improve the livelihoods of groups and communities, their spaces, services and environments. In this context, the scope and possible meanings of 'mapping' drives central effort into the understanding of the different modes of exploration and representation of, and engagement with, communities. A number of questions direct this: What are the different meanings of mapping? What types of assets are captured by different approaches? What are the social, cultural, psychological, ethical, logistical contexts involved in different asset mapping approaches? How can we creatively analyse and reflect on insights gained from asset mapping methodologies? How can the different asset based methodology be communicated, expressed and represented more effectively to enhance their availability as a resource to the wider community? It is thus necessary to develop knowledge that comes from comparison, collaborative reflection and evaluation, and, cross-pollination of approaches, and, to develop useful methods and strategies form meaningful analysis, as well as representation and dissemination that will advance academic research, community practice and policy debates. Our collaboration and approach in this project is unique in that it seeks to advance the exchange of perspectives adopted by the different approaches and to promote an agenda for the evaluation of asset mapping across the humanities, arts and social sciences, both as a research methodology and as a co-design/coproduction tool supporting collective/community engagement and action. Our collaboration brings together Connected Communities projects from the Open University and the Royal College of Art, and the Universities of Keele, Leicester and Brunel and community partners The Glass-House, Young Vic Theatre and Atenistas Group in Greece. Our methodologies have tapped into narrative and theatre, cultural animation and digital story-telling, group discussion and creative visualisation, participatory chartography and game-playing and brings together philosophical perspectives from American Pragmatism, design studies and informatics, community media and citizen journalism, and fields of action in relation to placemaking and neighbourhood planning, creative networks and volunteerism. The project's innovative mode of delivery includes sharing knowledge and resources among existing CC projects through - field research trips, knowledge exchange with other research projects and experiential workshops where we will co-design approaches for exploring the application of asset mapping in wider and transnational contexts. We will disseminate our findings in workshops, through a visual website and collaborative report and will feed our lessons into the teaching curricula of the seven universities taking part in the project. Our ultimate aim is to develop the meaningful syntheses, processes and tools around asset mapping approaches that can be sustained and developed.

The ideas and practice of community-led design, participatory design or co-design have a long-standing tradition, especially in the context of urban design, planning and architecture. Community-led design goes beyond the one-dimensional process of consultation, helping involve people in decision-making throughout the design process, from visioning to implementation. There are many benefits from this approach, from improving civic participation and ensuring more democratic outcomes, to creating a strong sense of community and strengthening people's attachment to their place and to each other, to producing more sustainable solutions. However, 50 years after the first community-led design initiatives, and although professionals and organisations involved have reached a stage of maturity, community-led design is far from being mainstream in design and planning practice. An essential part of this problem is that the benefits of the approach are not thoroughly understood, measured or disseminated. The project aims to grapple with this problem, by exploring how a better case for community-led design can be made. This involves collecting and sharing evidence of good practice, collaboratively exploring measures of value and impact, and importantly, identifying ways for articulating and disseminating the benefits of community-led design. Grappling with this problem is of particular relevance at this particular time, with the emerging Localism agenda and the National Planning Policy Framework, which foresee an increased need for early and meaningful engagement and collaboration with communities. The project will deliver network and workshop events bringing together a variety of stakeholders in order to map the existing landscape of community-led design practice, connect good practice and identify its value. Stakeholders will include individuals from public bodies (policy makers, local authority representatives), third sector organisations mediating community-led design, independent organisations offering support and advice on design and creative economy, local communities, design and creative professionals and researchers. Alongside these events we will develop and implement a social networking platform (based on the Open University's Open Design Studio technology) in order to gather individual stories and experiences from participation in community-led design from all over the UK (including photos, videos and text). This will allow further collection, analysis, articulation and dissemination of evidence on the benefits of community-led design, leading to the creation of a clear research agenda for the future.

One of the driving forces behind the Connected Communities scheme is to help communities become stronger, more resilient and self-reliant so that they can adapt and thrive even in difficult times like the economic downturn. Recent research showed that good use of co-design and co-production in community-led developments could support community building, since the participatory approach encourages self-help and positive behaviour changes, as well as create new networks within the community and strengthen existing ones. Effective use of co-design and co-production in community-led developments could get hard to reach groups involved and come up with creative and practical solutions. However, successful use of co-design and co-production in community-led developments is still rare. In most cases, people are not truly treated as co-decision makers or co-developers. The majority of engagements in community-led development projects are confined to consultation practices. Experts observed that engagement activities should not focus on identifying needs, problems and deficiencies, as it could make people look at their communities with negative lenses. It would be more useful to concentrate on assets that a community possesses (e.g. self-help groups) and explore how to mobilise them to create new opportunities. As a result, we are interested in the 'Asset-Based Community Development: ABCD' concept, which begins with the self-mapping exercise to uncover hidden assets. For us, these positive principles will underpin our approach to co-design and co-production, since it concentrates on working with communities to achieve lasting changes. While the original ABCD concept aims to identify assets to create new economic opportunities, we are particularly interested in how to uncover hidden assets - the assets that are currently unrecognised by most community members (e.g. voices of marginalised members). We would like to find out why some community engagement activities include/exclude certain members of the community. What are conditions that enable/hinder community engagement? It is important to explore both practical and emotional barriers, e.g. ethnic/cultural differences that could lead to prejudices and stigmas. Although previous studies suggested that it is unrealistic to expect the same level of participation from all members of a community, there is a need to ensure that community engagement activities are designed in ways that allows active members to shine without making less-active members feel left out. We will explore how to practically make community-led developments more inclusive. We are also interested in exploring how the asset-mapping exercise might help us understand the makeup of a community. The idea is to understand the makeup of a well-functioning community and use it as an example to inspire other communities to realise their potential and help them move towards becoming well-functioning. Our main contribution and innovative element of our proposal is making the invisible (people, assets and the makeup of a community) visible so that they can be utilised to create new opportunities for communities in an inclusive manner. Hence, the aim of the project is 'to find out how to achieve inclusive asset-based community developments through co-design and co-production.' In Phase 1, we will try out different co-creation techniques (e.g. community film making and community-led design) to find out which co-creation activities include or exclude which groups and which activities are likely to identify which types of assets (e.g. economic, social or cultural assets). We will work with communities to learn from previous ABCD projects, reflect on our former community engagement experiences, identify potential barriers and explore how to address them. What we learn from piloting different co-creation activities will help us shape up the agendas and methodology for Phase 2, and plan inclusive co-production activities.

The aim of the project is to grow capacity for cross-sector design collaboration in placemaking through the use of a creative approach called 'cross-pollination'. The approach was developed and tested in a variety of research-based and practice-based projects in different settings and has proved successful in bringing people together to share and connect their assets (human, economic, cultural, social) as a basis for forming partnerships with the capacity to lead design initiatives. The idea is to scale up collaboration by providing spaces that can enable and empower placemaking actors (local authorities, civic sector organisations, community groups, academic institutions, cultural institutions and businesses) to incubate cross-sector collaborative design initiatives in local areas. The project will engage with three locally based partners who represent three different types of stakeholders or routes to placemaking in different locations in the three nations of Wales, Scotland and England: a local authority (Merthyr Tydfil in Wales), a place commission (Glasgow in Scotland) and a business improvement district (Clapham Junction in England). The activities of the project will help capture and share local knowledge, develop skills and capacity among individuals and organisations, and deliver local impacts.

Co-design, the direct engagement of all stakeholders in design activities for the purpose of addressing complex problems, is seen as a way for supporting and enhancing collective creativity and leading to better, more sustainable solutions. Co-design is also becoming an important theme in community research and within community-academic partnerships. The summit organized by the AHRC-led Connected Communities program in July 2012 highlighted the need to tackle the theme of 'community engagement in and with research'. Within this context, the co-design and co-delivery of research and practice in community-academic partnerships is increasingly seen as a valuable paradigm for tackling complex social problems based on the principles of shared vision, equitable involvement, ownership and trust, capacity building and relevance. Despite their differences, those involved (community groups, community organisations and academics) recognize that through their partnership and interconnections they can create new opportunities for innovation and build their ability to identify and solve complex issues that would not have been possible to do alone. However this is not a trivial task. It requires the development of a shared vision, equitable involvement and trust, and overcoming limitations in resources, but also differences in culture, terminology/language used and methodology/practice. This challenge sets the scene for this project. The project proposes and reflects on a process for co-designing research in community-academic partnerships based on set of co-creative techniques that we call 'Design by Consensus'. The process is based on 'role playing' and collaborative visioning techniques. The aim of the proposed process is to unleash and build upon the intrinsic capacities of communities, community organizations and academic institutions in order to form a common research vision, helping scale up their practice and extend their reach. This process will result to the following outputs: - the development of a visionary code of practice/framework for community-academic co-creation and co-delivery of research using a set of shared principles; - the specification of research agendas that can help community-academic partnerships build their capacity using their existing assets and extend their reach and practice; - the production of a 'sketchbook/notebook of reflections' that aims to visually record reflections but also emotions for the proposed process, community-academic partnership and their outputs. The above outputs set the foundation for the co-delivery of research in phase 2.