One Vision, Five Work Packages

Beach cleaning reduces litter and encourages ocean stewardship by increasing participants’ environmental awareness. Plastics, especially, travel globally and persist in the oceans for prolonged periods. Current collection efforts typically focus on removing litter rather than exploring the journey of the materials found and their potential for circular valorisation.

Beach plastics collected during clean-ups often comprise mixed materials contaminated with sand and organic matter, complicating recycling efforts. Implementing the Beach Clean 2.0 methodology, which emphasises sorting at the source, streamlines material flow and polymer purity, critical factors for effective mechanical recycling and the development of circular plastic systems.

To enable a circular economy, exemplars of community level practice are needed, especially for complex waste like electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). As a demonstrator project, obsolete WEEE electrical cables within Ulster University were diverted from disposal with options for reuse and resource recovery explored.

The project documented Rathlin’s rich but sometimes undervalued culture of repair. Case studies showcased the value of local design thinking and repair skills. The Repair Café diverted 30 items from landfill (139kg ~1,554kg CO2 savings) and inspired the community to continue the initiative, encouraging knowledge-sharing and supporting sustainable, circular practices.

This project strengthens the Future Island-Island initiative by linking Rathlin’s heritage to sustainability goals. Insights linked to the fisherman’s gansey jersey support wool projects, while repair culture stories encourage reuse. Online platforms, publications, and events raise awareness, reinforcing green transition sustainable habits and community-led environmental change.

This project culminated in an immersive experience recreating a Neolithic axe, offering a model for designing educational engagements with rare artefacts. It demonstrates how virtual production can solve preservation challenges and support the integration of historically significant objects into museum, community, and educational settings through accessible, interactive digital experiences.

The democratisation of 3DGS enables communities with limited resources to sustainably produce high-fidelity digital replicas, improving access to heritage sites and artefacts. Learning outcomes revealed the broad applicability of 3DGS across creative pipelines, extending its potential beyond tourism into sectors such as education, gaming, film, and digital storytelling.

The Library of Prints and Poo enhances the LIFE Raft project’s environmental legacy. It shares learning across conservation and eradication projects while promoting creative approaches within culture and society, improving project performance while building valuable skills.

These digital files offer potential for an open-source database of bite imprints that could be shareable with other conservation projects and place-based communities worldwide if made accessible via a digital platform or through local 3D printing where needed.

This project uses photogrammetry, LIDAR, and Gaussian Splatting to 3D scan Rathlin’s key sites, creating digital twins for the Green Digital Transition. It includes co-design with stakeholders to ensure authentic representation of the island’s ecosystem and community, culminating in a VR submersible experience of the Rathlin seabed.

The Colours of Rathlin project explores natural dyeing using wool from the island, creatively repurposing non-indigenous plants and organic waste from local cafés and bars. This sustainable approach highlights Rathlin’s unique ecology and culture while reducing waste and celebrating natural colour palettes through environmentally conscious textile practices.

Polypropylene ropes contribute significantly to marine contamination, shedding microplastics through wear and degradation. These particles persist in ocean ecosystems, harming marine life and entering the food chain. As synthetic materials, they do not biodegrade, leading to long-term pollution and raising urgent concerns about sustainability in maritime industries and practices.

Rural communities like Rathlin Island are often excluded from design-led regeneration processes. Simultaneously, early-career designers lack direct experience with remote, place-based sustainability challenges. This initiative addressed both by embedding co-design into a real-world context of ecological, cultural, and infrastructural importance.

DesignLink employed a practice-based, co-design methodology incorporating design sprints, client briefs, peer feedback, and live presentations. This iterative process supported real-time knowledge exchange between students, early-stage professionals, academics, organisations, and businesses, and foregrounded reflective pedagogical strategies in architectural and design education.

Architects of Change (AOC) introduces environmental awareness to primary school children (KS1/KS2). The programme addresses the tension between short-term actions and long-term green ecosystem goals by supporting change-makers of the future, encouraging them to become active environmental thinkers and influential voices within their communities.

To explore sustainability challenges and solutions in this context, the programme involves young people experiencing different forms of geographical ‘islandness’. Place-based educational approaches not only deepen learning by connecting it to lived experience but also help shape meaningful pathways toward a more sustainable and locally grounded future.

Through research informed teaching, final year students of BDes Graphic Design (UU) worked directly with the community of Rathlin, adopting participation-based approaches to collaborate and respond creatively to a range of societal needs relating to sustainability. The process involved knowledge exchange between community and students and sharing of rich media to represent new concepts.

From 2014 to 2023, ten visual minute boards captured Rathlin’s oral histories, community goals, and environmental efforts. Commissioned by RDCA and partners, these reflect evolving island narratives. How can past co-design practices and sustainable approaches inform future design thinking in the context of climate change, green transition, and net-zero goals?

Participatory Action Research is a collaborative approach where those affected by the subject are active partners in all stages, aiming to create socially just change. Research through Design (RtD) places design at the core of the process, followed by a political/design ethnography to examine its impact within community and social contexts.

Rathlin Island’s sustainable future is shaped by a complex policy environment at local, regional, national, and international levels. The island faces intertwined challenges relating to economic development, environmental sustainability, and community well-being, requiring coherent governance and policy alignment across Northern Ireland, the U.K., the Republic of Ireland, and the EU.

Future Island–Island is an interdisciplinary project linking diverse sustainability contexts and concerns. Each work package surfaced insights to inform and transform policy for Rathlin’s sustainable future, supporting green transition goals. The policy team sought to systematically review and represent these.

Future Island-Island represents complex networks of people (Rathlin residents, design and creative practitioners, public and private organisations and stakeholders) and things (technologies, materials, natural ecosystems and policies). The Green Policies work package helped visualise these networks and reveal how complex activities were unfolding.