Talking about co-design and stakeholder engagement is one thing. Knowing how to do it is another. While organisations and universities like to make engagement central to their work, institutional practices are not keeping pace. Institutional policies, publishing pressures, and additional time needed stand in the way. Building capacity for engaged research is more than knowing how to run a focus group.
Engaged research embeds stakeholder views throughout the life of the research project. It encourages creation, and active collaboration with policy makers, practitioners and communities.
A workshop was held mid 2024 to bring together research leaders with hands-on experiences. These are people who are keen to see their research improve things for society and individuals. They see this as a timely opportunity for key people to coordinate their efforts. The result is a large volume published by the National Academies Press containing the workshop discussions and ideas.
Partnering with communities, policy makers and others is challenging. Measuring the impact of such research requires a suitable evaluation system.
The book of proceedings has 8 chapters:
- Introduction
- Importance of engaged researach
- Challenges and solutions: synthesising two landscape reviews
- Promising approaches for addressing key tensions in community engaged research
- Aligning mission and incentives: valuing and prioritizing engaged research
- Valuing diverse forms of expertise
- Aligning core values and measurements
- Next steps for action
The title of the publication is, Building Institutional Capacity for Engaged Research. You can read free online. Note this is an academic text with long sentences.
From the introduction
The complex challenges facing society today call for new ways of doing research that bring researchers, policy makers, community leaders and members, industry stakeholders, and others together. The aim is to identify evidence needs, contribute different kinds of knowledge and expertise, and use evidence to accomplish shared goals.
Although momentum is building toward a research enterprise that more routinely enables and rewards this type of collaboration, the development of institutional capacities to support diverse forms of engaged research have not kept pace with the need for them.
Politicians and planners make frequent calls for older Australians to give up their three bedroom homes to make way for “working families”. They expect them to move into apartments. But is urban density the answer? Regardless of the ageist inference that older people are “hogging all the houses”, with the political focus on working families, little room is left to discuss the housing needs of older cohorts. 
This is a major work by Bruce Judd, Diana Olsberg, Joanne Quinn and Oya Demirbilek (2010). It challenges the often held assumption that older people are “taking up space” in big houses that they no longer need – assumptions that their homes are “underoccupied”. 
Three bedrooms and urban living are what most older people want. These are two of the key findings in a new Australian report from AHURI. Age specific housing is not a preference. So researchers suggest more innovation to attract the older cohort so they can age in place after all. 
What do government representatives think is the best way to supply homes suitable for people with disability? Mandating accessible features in all new mainstream housing is the way to go. That means both owners and renters would benefit. Plus accessible housing would suit ageing in place and not be detrimental to the rest of the population.
This article was written when the Australian Building Codes Board called for responses to their Options Paper on Accessible Housing in 2017. Using facts and figures, she challenges the many false assumptions that the industry and others hold about the need for universal design in housing. She also covers assumptions about costs. So yes, it’s possible.
If you ask an older person if their home will suit them in their later years, they are likely to say yes. But how will they know and will they find out when it’s too late? That is the key issue when policy makers talk about ageing in place. Are we actually prepared for it? And not only are they people’s homes, they are potentially the workplaces for care service staff. So what next for an ageing Australia?
A significant number of people find certain aspects of the built environment uncomfortable, distressing or a barrier due to neurological differences. To address this, the British Standards Institute has a guide for designing built environments to include people who are neurodivergent. The whole population is neurodiverse, individuals might be neurotypical or neurodivergent. 
Design for the Mind
