Newsletter, September 2006 |
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Contents this month
Project news
The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) has just begun the
first consultation with their SD Panel, which we recruited for them.
The topic is ‘Redefining Progress’ and aims to look
at economics, progress, government and wellbeing. The SDC hopes
to pull together the comments from this first consultation and draw
on them for three different reports; a summary report summarising
the findings of the consultation; an SDC paper prepared as an SDC
input into UK Government’s thinking and research on wellbeing
and the development of the framework wellbeing indicator; and an
SDC publication which will be a final report that will consider
the challenges on ‘what the UK would look like if it was re-framed
around a different model of progress’.
Surrey County Council recently concluded its consultation period
on the Submission Stage of their Waste Plan, which is due to be
submitted to the Planning Inspectorate shortly. Dialogue by Design
has collaborated with the Council on numerous consultations on the
Waste Plan using a number of integrated systems to deal with large
volumes of paper-based and online responses and it is satisfying
to see a project like this right through from early issues and options
consultations to the submission stage.
The submission stage has provided many challenges of its own. As
those involved in similar processes would be aware, the challenge
faced by local authorities to meet often quite stringent guidelines
can be daunting. The inspector requires representations to be made
against tests of soundness which even for planning professionals
can be hard to follow. Our challenge is to make it possible for
the public to submit representations in the way required by the
inspector, but also in a way that is easy to follow for the lay
person. Added to this we need to capture representations and pass
them on to the inspector accurately and quickly.
sciencehorizons
Launched this month at the BA Festival of Science, sciencehorizons
is a new project, funded by the DTI and run by a consortium of Dialogue
by Design, Demos, Graphic Science, Shared Practice and BBC Worldwide
Interactive Learning.
sciencehorizons aims to engage the public in dialogue about the
implications of future science and technology. The project will
collect views about the issues raised by some of the possible future
directions for science and technology which have been identified
by the DTI’s Horizon Scanning Centre, from a broad set of
participants.
The programme is being implemented through three different strands
all of which consider the same materials and questions, but at different
depths.
Materials and content are being developed between September and
December 2006. These will be used in a series of events including
deliberative panel, events in science centres and self-managed community
discussion groups. The events will roll out between January and
June 2007 and the report will be published at the BA Festival of
Science in 2007.
For more information and to register your interest in the project
please visit www.sciencehorizons.org.uk.
Institution of Chemical Engineers - A Roadmap for 21st Century
Chemical Engineering
The Institution of Chemical Engineers has an important role in
setting policy throughout the world on the uses of chemical engineering.
We are running an internal consultation with IChemE members to decide
various policy positions that the Institution should take in important
areas including Sustainability, Energy, Water and Biosystems Engineering.
This fascinating consultation touches inevitably on many important
and controversial areas and is likely to influence our lives in
many ways over the next ten years and beyond. (We do not provide
a link to the consultation website as the consultation is for IChemE
members only.)
