This Community Link Partnership between the School of Mechanical and Design Engineering and Enable Ireland has been particularly successfully across a realm of activity over the years. Both partners believe that this partnership represents a number of advantages, including the promotion of civic engagement in the Higher Education sector, facilitating participatory action research and joint publication of research papers. Enhancing the public profile of TU Dublin’s Product Design undergraduate programme is a further benefit. Such partnership activity is core to TU Dublin and Enable Ireland’s strategic plan which values collaborative initiatives with external partners, and seeks to address issues of social exclusion experienced by individuals with disabilities throughout Ireland.
In terms of direct tangible success this partnership has directly resulted in;
- A funded PhD [Funding awarded IRCSET- €73,000]
- 16 international conference presentations/publications
- 4 undergraduate conference presentations
- RTE TV coverage
- Newspaper coverage
- Seed funding [€18,000], DIT Foundation [€2,500], Corporate funding [€7,500]
- State funding
- Exhibitions [American Ambassador, Microsoft, AT Training courses]
- Best Final Year Project awards (also generated over 200 individual concepts in 12 years.)
In addition, this has led to collaboration with Microsoft, BT Ireland, TCD, University of Cambridge, and Leckey (A manufacturer of specialist postural support devices in Northern Ireland).
Enable Ireland has proceeded to work in partnership with TU Dublin on our Mechanical Engineering and Product Design programmes, supporting both undergraduate and postgraduate students with TU Dublin’s own Students Learning with Communities initiative. In 2012, this partnership approach was a runner up in the IE Engineering Excellence Awards.