Why we need each other: why we put co-production at the heart of Leeds Institute for Societal Futures

We are delighted to have recently announced our first ever cohort of funded projects, developed under our support via our flagship co-production training programme and seed funding opportunity, Shape Tomorrow Together. As we prepare to also welcome our first cohort of students to our first ever Masters programme, our AI Ethics and Society, MSc, it feels like a good moment to reflect on what we have been trying to build so far.

Our work as an Institute covers a whole breadth of activity areas – research development, capacity building, impact and policy engagement, partnership work, postgraduate education, CPD. We do all of this activity across some really significant topics of societal interest: AI ethics and responsible digital societies; health inequalities; polarisation, trust and social cohesion; migration and belonging – these are big, complex topics. But there is still a single, core ambition that ties of all of those activity threads together.

We inhabit a world of accelerating change and complexity, in which uncertainty, interdependency and insecurity have become shared conditions of life. No person, academic discipline or sector can answer these problems alone. Nor should they, for no institution, individual or organisation can possibly know everything. Incompleteness is therefore a fundamental characteristic of meaningful human knowledge, and it is precisely because our knowledge is incomplete, that we need other people. Knowledge comes in many diverse forms, exists in many places, and is held by everyone and everything from their own unique perspective. Knowledge is everywhere, and we need engagement with this breadth to really make a difference.

We know that the people most affected by societal challenges are often the people least involved in designing responses to them

Briony Thomas, Deputy Director (Research and Engagement)

We therefore believe that genuine, meaningful co-production (or collaborative design, development and delivery) that brings together insights from as many sectors, disciplines, and lived experiences as possible is the best way to understand the contours of a problem, or to meaningfully think about how we might respond to it. Our ambition, therefore, is quite simple: practice co-production, teach co-production, enable co-production and champion co-production, all with the end goal of delivering and enabling genuinely meaningful societal change.

Our Deputy Directors, Briony Thomas and Tom Campbell, told us more about what that means for their respective areas of responsibility, and why they believe this approach is so necessary for delivering the change we really wish to see in our future societies.

Briony Thomas, Deputy Director (Research & Engagement)

Co-production matters because it helps us create better responses to the challenges we face. The most significant societal issues are rarely experienced in the same way by different people, yet too often the solutions we develop are not designed with the people who will use them, or be affected by them, in mind. Human-centred design has long recognised that if we want solutions that work in the real world, we need to involve the people who understand different parts of the problem. But how and when we involve those people is just as important as whether we involve them at all. Genuine co-production means bringing together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, communities, businesses, artists and people with lived experience from the outset, and creating meaningful opportunities for them to contribute along the way. This is not a desirable addition to the research process; it is fundamental to it. Every person brings knowledge that others do not have, and every voice has the potential to reshape how we understand a challenge and the actions we take in response.

We know that the people most affected by societal challenges are often the people least involved in designing responses to them. Co-production helps us challenge that pattern by creating opportunities for a wider range of people to influence priorities, contribute to decision-making, and help shape the solutions that will ultimately affect their lives. For me, one of the most important contributions our Institute can make is not only supporting excellent co-produced research, but creating the conditions for more people to learn, practise and champion these approaches themselves. Through coaching, training, capacity building and opportunities to apply learning in practice, we can help grow a community of people who are confident in leading and embedding co-production in their own work. Rather than co-production being something that happens within individual projects, it then becomes part of how people approach research, collaboration and change more broadly.

Success, for me, is not simply delivering co-produced projects, but helping to create the confidence, skills and relationships that enable meaningful change to continue long after our direct involvement has ended. It also creates access in both directions: access to the communities, organisations and individuals whose knowledge can shape our work, and access to the expertise, resources and opportunities that universities can offer in return.

At its best, co-production helps us move beyond the assumptions of the status quo. It encourages us to ask different questions, explore new possibilities and see challenges from perspectives we may otherwise overlook. Combined with research, evidence and diversity of experiences, it becomes a powerful way of generating knowledge that is not only rigorous, but genuinely capable of inspiring and enabling meaningful change.

Tom Campbell, Deputy Director (Education)

For me, compelling programmes begin not with market demand alone, but with the grand challenges of our age. They arise from the problems the world presents to us and, if they are to be successful, need to be anchored in our community’s strengths, so that students experience a genuine journey towards generating meaningful change.
The first step is figuring out what those problems are, and finding the right people to try to understand them.

Our AI Ethics and Society MSc and Creative Health MASc have both been co-designed through a series of workshops involving civil society partners, academics and professional services colleagues from across the University, as well as students. We believe that engaging these wider communities allows us to understand more fully the challenges that our programmes need to address. But we also believe that you can’t design an effective and engaging programme without including the very people who understand the student experience the best – the students themselves. The result is a curriculum shaped not just by expertise, but by the experiences and aspirations of the people it exists to serve.
Challenge-based learning is then one way of responding to the dilemmas that flow from this: starting with societal problems, bringing together voices from different disciplines and sectors to speak to them, and enabling students to co-create responses that matter beyond the classroom. At Leeds Institute for Societal Futures, we are extending this approach by building cross-faculty, multi-sector teams around the Institute’s challenge areas.

In the end, the success of our educational portfolio will not be measured only in enrolments, but in whether our graduates can think and act across boundaries —bringing research, creativity and lived experience together to change how society understands itself and to help shape societal futures. That is the horizon towards which we hope to steer our educational portfolio, and by extension, it is the approach we hope our graduates will carry with them into everything they do thereafter.
Co-design thrives on diverse perspectives. If you'd like to be part of the conversation, connect with Leeds Institute for Societal Futures and join our mailing list for news, events and opportunities to get involved.

Co-design thrives on diverse perspectives. If you'd like to be part of the conversation, connect with Leeds Institute for Societal Futures and join our mailing list for news, events and opportunities to get involved.