Future Island-Island is an AHRC funded research project that brings together community members, academics, and practitioners to co-create design-led research for greener, more sustainable island and coastal futures.
Research for Real-world Benefit
Through the lens of Rathlin Island, Northern Ireland’s only inhabited offshore island, the project explores how design, creativity and digital technologies can support new approaches to waste, heritage, tourism and education. Working with the island as both collaborator and teacher, it develops practical, place-based responses that support Rathlin’s own ambitions while offering shared learning for other island, coastal and rural communities.
A Green Transition Ecosystem Project
Future Island-Island is one of four Green Transition Ecosystems exploring how design can help communities respond to environmental change. Connecting partners across Northern Ireland, Ireland, Scotland and the Nordic corridor, the project brings together research, creativity and lived experience to explore what community-led adaptation can look like in remote and coastal places. Funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Future Observatory programme at the Design Museum, it forms part of a wider national effort to imagine more sustainable futures (AH/Y003780/1).
Learning Through Place
Rathlin Island sits at the edge of the Atlantic, six miles from the north coast of Ireland.
On Rathlin Island, resilience is part of everyday life. Weather, transport, housing, resources and biodiversity are not distant issues but lived realities that shape how people adapt, collaborate and care for place. Working alongside island residents and RDCA, Future Island-Island explores how design, creativity and local knowledge can help communities respond to environmental transition while imagining more sustainable futures.
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