BOUNCE🟣

What if the people inside the system were the ones who redesigned it? 💡 This Thursday — Global Accessibility Awareness Day — we’re hosting a live webinar showcasing the BOUNCE × ETBI Universal Design Challenge. 16 FET practitioners. 4 real challenges. 12 weeks of design thinking, prototyping, and seriously brave work. They tackled admissions, digital literacy, assessment, and organisational culture — and what they came up with is genuinely exciting. 📅 Thursday 21 May 🕧 12.30 – 2pm 💻 Online — free to attend Share with anyone who should be there. 🙌 Link to register in comments #GAAD2026 #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay #UniversalDesign #DesignThinking #inclusiveEducation

A great day at the showcase for the BOUNCE X ETBI Challenge in the @thedigitalhub A massive congratulations to all the teams who brought the projects so far and presented them with such flair. Really looking forward to next step and love these ideas int the world! Photos with thanks to @lorraine.murphy.942

What a wonderful few days. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Our founder @danielle_townsend_pro spent last week at @stovenetwork in Stranraer with an extraordinary gathering of practitioners doing genuinely important work, across community, place, and people, from all corners of Scotland and the UK. The room was full of honest conversation. Real projects, real challenges, real hope. The kind of energy that reminds you why this work matters. A particular highlight was hearing political economist Neil McInroy challenge the room with a simple but profound reframe: we need to stop funding artists and start investing in them. It’s the difference between a transaction and a commitment — and it goes to the heart of how we build a social economy that actually works. Thanks to the panel @emmett_scanlon from @irisharchitecturefoundation @mre_arts Kimberley and Neil for their open and frank opinions expertly guided by @wheelerkatharine Community-rooted, culture-led, people-centred. That’s the thread running through every project in that room. It was great to share the BOUNCE X A Playful City Challenge with attendees. And to deliver a workshop with the impossibly impressive Kimberly Guthrie ✊ A massive thank you to The Stove team for their support with the project too! So much food for thought. So grateful for the conversation and the company. And looking forward to seeing the dialectogram crafted by Mitch Miller @dialectographer and Alison Irvine #SocialEconomy #CreativePlacemaking #CommunityDesign #WhatWeDoNow #TheStoveNetwork DesignForGood IrishDesign

It started with a street. 🗺 Eleven Challengers. 113 conversations. One very honest question: whose city is this? The BOUNCE × A Playful City Drury Street Challenge Case Study is officially out — and it’s a full record of what happens when you take participatory design seriously. Interviews on kerbs. Dot-voting with residents. Research that actually changed the proposals. Head to the Patreon link in bio to read the full thing. #BOUNCEdesign #DruryStreet #DesignDublin #UrbanDesign #ParticipatoryDesign IrishDesign APlayfulCity PublicSpace DesignProcess

Check out our new Patreon BOUNCE Back, where you can watch, listen and be inspired! Live Now! Aisling Murphy and Fiona Ennis’s talk introduces Something Somewhere, a self-initiated design collaboration that brings design skills to grassroots projects in remote communities around the world. In this session at Bounce 2025, they share the motivations behind starting the initiative, the process they’ve developed for identifying and supporting purpose-driven organisations, and what happens when designers step outside the studio and work directly within the contexts they’re designing for. We’re building a new space for the BOUNCE community with a growing lineup of content—interviews, discussions, behind-the-scenes conversations, and inspiring talks from designers and creative thinkers we admire. Joining helps us deepen the conversation and grow a connected community of practitioners who care about process, experimentation, and critical design. Free to join, subscriptions for those who want to support this important work. Link in the comments and BIO

We’re delighted to welcome Lorraine Murphy and Eimear Carragher as challengers in the BOUNCE × ETBI Universal Design Challenge. Over the next 12 weeks, a group of Further Education & Training practitioners will come together to explore how Universal Design can be embedded into everyday practice — from systems and workflows to learning experiences. Using the BOUNCE Challenge methodology, participants work through a participatory co-design process: exploring real challenges, reframing assumptions, generating ideas, and prototyping possibilities together. This programme isn’t about producing polished solutions. It’s about building confidence, shared language, and practical capability, while creating space for experimentation, collaboration, and learning. Looking forward to seeing the insights, provocations and ideas that emerge along the way. #UniversalDesign #CoDesign #DesignThinking #FurtherEducation #Accessibility #Innovation

Thanks @slanted_publishers for being our partner a the write up. For more content visit our Patreon. Link in bio.

This was BOUNCE @bouncecreativeie 2026 in Dublin at the famous Trinity College, centered around the theme of ‘Being’. So blessed with closing the conference with my performative lecture ‘What Makes Us Human’. Thank you @danielle_townsend_pro for the invitation and organizing this 8m screen behind me! 🙃 Beautiful Climate-Ice font for the title by Gaile @buster0friendly

📣 Open Call Just Launched, for the BOUNCE x ETBI Design Challenge. We’re assembling designer/design facilitators to support a 12-week hybrid programme bringing practitioners from across the @etbi_ireland (FET) sector into a shared space of enquiry, reflection and experimentation. The Challenge, to explore how Universal Design can be embedded across the system — and we’re looking for experienced creatives to help guide the process. Not for you? Tag someone who fits the bill! ⏰ Deadline 20th Feb 2026 5pm Full details Online, link in comments. 🔗Application Form LINK IN BIO

Looking back at BOUNCE 2026 we wanted to share some wonderful photography that helped capture the day and the energy in the room. We hope you have had time to process some of the big ideas surfaced throughout the day. We have a summary of some of the highlights over on our Patreon. Link in BIO and in the comments. Photography Credit @aleksandraschmidt

I had the opportunity to present our work on reimagining Drury Street at the Bounce conference, alongside the brilliant Jacob & Laura Merrigan. What started as a design brief became a deep dive into how people actually experience a street, its rhythms, pressures, contradictions, and quiet moments in between. This project pushed me to slow down. To listen more. To look beyond visuals and think about belonging, care, and how small interventions can shape everyday life in meaningful ways. After years of working in fast-moving creative spaces, this felt different. It was about patience, observation, and designing with people, not just for them. A huge thank you to @danielle_townsend_pro of @bouncecreativeie and @dublin_a_playful_city for creating this space, and especially to my incredible teammates TJ Ryan, Seán O’Beacháin, and Aine Power for the energy and collaboration throughout this journey.

What a day. We are still digesting the incredible insights and thought provoking talks from this years BOUNCE! A massive thank you to our speakers and attendees for making the day so successful. And the BOUNCE team who pulled off something truly special. Our wrap video is brought to you by our partner the lightening fast and talented gang at @hedgehogsvsfoxes