The Creative Exchange (CX) is a Knowledge Exchange Hub for the Creative Economy funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). We aim to develop strategic partnerships with creative businesses and cultural organisations, to strengthen and diversify their collaborative research activities and increase the number of Arts and Humanities researchers actively engaged in research-based knowledge exchange. CX has a network of 41 partners throughout the UK who we will be collaborating with, including: the BBC, MediaCity UK, Microsoft Research, TATE Liverpool, SAGE Gateshead, Opera North, NESTA, Lancaster City Council, the Storey Creative Industries Centre, FutureEverything and over 30 small and medium sized companies working in the sector.

Our research in Newcastle will focus on cross-disciplinary, user-centred and participatory research with users and industrial partners. Our collaborative research will explore the broad theme of the ‘digital public space’ through six key themes; personalisation, experience, participation, connectivity, narrative and identity. This will inform to the development of prototype digital systems and services that innovate in the areas of broadcast interactive media, user-generated content, narrative experience and live performance, leading to local and national deployments and field trials. Newcastle’s node of the CX is supporting this research by offering 7 fully-funded PhD studentships to undertake project-focused, practice-based research, including funding to support placements with out creative sector partners (please see here for further information).

This page will be updated during the course of the Hub with collaborative projects and knowledge exchange outcomes. In the meantime, please see the main CX website for more information: thecreativeexchange.org

This project builds on the Bespoke project, which resulted in the deployment Viewpoint, a public voting device inspired by difficulties encountered when attempting to encourage residents in a Preston estate to voice their opinions. Many residents did not want to be identified as ‘busybodies’, while others felt disenfranchised and saw little reason to participate in local or national politics.

Viewpoint was developed to address this issue in two ways: by making voting on local issues very easy and by providing a feedback mechanism to make the outcome of consultations more visible. The device allowed councillors and local organisations to post weekly questions on three devices located in public areas, on which local residents could vote easily using two large buttons on the device. During a two-month deployment, over 1,800 votes were placed and the deployment was successful in exposing a number of issues surrounding local democracy and participation.

This project aims to bring the output of the Bespoke project to residents in the North East, as well as exploring the commercialisation of the design and technology through collaboration with YouGov, a national polling organisation. This will be achieved by redeploying Viewpoint in a variety of local context with different partners.

Date: July 2011 – June 2012

Funding: EPSRC Additional Impact Sponsorship £28,854

Researchers:  Nick Taylor, Martyn Dade-Robertson

Chronic diseases are now the leading causes of death in both developing and developed countries. Such conditions include diabetes, asthma, arthritis, heart failure, COPD, dementia and a range of disabling psychological conditions such as depression. In the UK the cost of care of people with chronic conditions consumes the majority of health and social care resources, for example, accounting for over 80% of GP consultations. While the UK and India have very different practices and structures for healthcare delivery, the effective management of chronic illness is a priority for both countries. Patients in rural areas, however, present particular challenges that neither country’s healthcare systems are well configured to address. This issue is particularly relevant to India with 71% of the population in rural areas. While less than 1 in 5 of the UK population are rural dwellers, large parts of the country are sparsely populated; for example in Scotland, 29% of the population live in rural areas. Rural healthcare inequality in both countries arises from a number of factors, including transport costs and the inaccessibility of specialist services.

The goal of the TRUMP project is to explore the potential of mobile technologies in the development of a platform to support chronic disease management by simultaneously considering the needs of rural areas of India and the UK. Trust in such systems is vital if they are be accepted by patients and health workers alike, and this issue will form a central part of the development of the platform. Two common chronic conditions, diabetes and depression, have been chosen as exemplars for the development of the platform and its evaluation.

TRUMP is a multidisciplinary project involving academic researchers from the UK and India, together with partner organisations drawn from the business and community sectors. Working together, this team will: perform a detailed analysis of the healthcare context, design sustainable technology solutions compatible with local and national healthcare policies; incorporate existing proven chronic management programmes and training. This implies support for novel patient record systems, mechanisms for tracking the patient (symptoms and behaviour), as well as patient awareness of self-management.

Date: Sep 2011 – Aug 2014

Funding: EPSRC: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. £576,369

Researchers: Patrick Olivier (PI), Peter Phillimore  – Geography, Politics & Scoiology, Mike Catt – Institute for Ageing & Health, Mike Trenell -Institute of Cellular Medicine (CIs).

Collaborators: Peter Edwards (University of Aberdeen), City University, Lancaster University

In collaboration with Microsoft Research, we are developing and using .NET Gadgeteer in our own research, as well as running workshops, and developing new modules.

Projects Using Gadgeteer

• Physical Video Games and Board Game Interfaces

  I am working on interface designs for video games and board games across many different genres and game play styles. Video games are inherently interactive yet modern input controllers are physically static and generalised to allow for a wide range of ...

  Tom Smith, October 26, 2011
• 

  Telematic Dinner Party

  A Telematic Dinner Party is a meal where two remote groups are brought together through the internet and video projections to share a meal at a table. For these dinners, each group of guests will be in two separate rooms and integrated on a single tabl...

  Cassim Ladha, Robert Comber, Dan Jackson, August 26, 2011

UCHD is a type of co-design, because we work alongside service users and providers to understand their experiences and stories and, together, find ways to improve things. UCHD is also the name of the team of researchers, designers and healthcare professionals who use this technique. We work within the NHS, and with NHS partners to find more innovative design methods which the NHS can use as part of its ongoing practice. We’re interested in how thinking about, and doing design can help in three areas:

• Improving existing services
• Designing service innovations
• Designing strategic change

Start Date: 2009

Funding: NIHR: National Institute for Health Research

Researchers: Peter Wright (PI)

See the UCHD Project Website

Ageing in Place and the Impact of Emerging Technologies on the Lives of Older People.

Demographic ageing has raised many issues for policy and practice, particularly in terms of how society should best support and care for the ageing population. Governments around the western world have recommended that older people should be supported to ‘age in place’ in the belief that this will also promote quality of life and well-being in later life. With a policy focus on enabling older people to remain in their homes for as long as possible there is an increasing need to critically look at the impact that technologies supporting ‘ageing in place’  have on the everyday lives of older people. It is important therefore that the social and ethical implications that these technologies could have on older people are explored from a number of different perspectives, including those of older people, designers, social scientists and computing scientists. Whilst new technologies clearly have the potential to support independent living in the home for older people, what is less clear is whether or not these technologies also promote a wider connection outside of the home. The project funds social gerontology lecturer Dr Katie Brittain to condust a year-long discipline hop in the Digital Interaction Group in Culture Lab, and use this to forge new collaborations and build national and international links with experts in the design and development of emerging technologies for older people.

Date: Sept 2011 – Aug 2012

Funding: EPSRC: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. £81,484

Researchers: Katie Brittain – Institute of Health & Society (PI), Patrick Olivier.

Decoding User Experience Qualities with and through Technology over Time.

User Experience (UX) is a complex, but promising concept in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This Marie Curie project aims to identify the key UXCodes, in particular to decode the UX qualities for a better ICT-enabled life for older people, following a humanistic, dialogical approach. The key premise is that people act on the basis of social relationships, which influence the quality of an experience with a technology. Gained insights are translated into for practical guidance for designers and generalized by applying experience-centered theories and research methodologies. In addition, the pattern approach is applied as valuable way to preserve knowledge for practitioners in future projects, and optimising technological innovation and opportunity for older people to enrich their lived experience with and through technology.

The European Union also recognized the relevance of this topic by focusing research on Quality of Experience (QoE) within the FP7 ICT Work Programme 2009-10 and calls for research into more natural, intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces and new ways to interact with technology, machines, devices and other artefacts. The proposed research will underpin the essential priority of ICTs in supporting daily life in today’s digital society.

Project status: Ongoing

Funding: European Commission Funded under the 7th Framework Programme. £170,668

Researcher: Marianna Obrist (Marie Curie Fellow), Peter Wright (PI), Patrick Olivier (CI).

A monitoring device to objectively assess functional/ psychosocial impairment in older-age adults with major depression.

 Depression is one of the most common psychiatric disorders, with at least one in six adults meeting the criteria for a major depressive episode at some time in their life. In later-life depression has a huge negative impact on quality of life and is directly associated with functional impairment. Although the illness is defined by the occurrence of low mood, over recent years there has been an increasing understanding of the profile and magnitude of neuropsychological impairments in mood disorders. These have been shown to be of greater magnitude in older age individuals. One of the most important consequences of neuropsychological and emotional processing deficits is their impact on social and everyday functioning and disability. To date, most studies in older age individuals have utilised questionnaire-based measures of everyday function which have major problems with accuracy and validity as they either rely on informant accounts or are self-report. Technological advances such as the actigraph have enabled more precise assessment of locomotor activity and circadian rhythms in normal, everyday living, while within the pervasive computing community, social informatics technologies based on auditory signal processing have been developed that can measure aspects of social interaction using situated measures of spoken communication. Our aim is to develop a monitoring device to objectively assess functional/ psychosocial impairment in older-age adults with major depression. We will call it Sociometer. 

Sociometer

Date: May 2010 – April 2011

Funding: MRC: Medical Research Council £247,327

Researchers: John O’Brien – Institute for Ageing & Health (PI),  Peter Gallagher, and Nicole Ferrier – Institute of Neuroscience, Jeff Neasham, and Satnam Dlay – Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering (CIs).  Patrick Olivier (Coll). Roisin McNaney, Bin Gao,  Cas Ladha, Karim Ladha

The ease with which digital files can be copied and shared presents profound challenges for the creative industries. This project seeks to explore alternative business models for the dissemination of digital content and takes art as a case from which to learn. The British artist David Hockney has received much attention for drawings he has made both on the iPhone and iPad. The images have been both produced and disseminated digitally, leading critics to ask what or where the original image might be. Traditional notions of a signed original or even a limited print run begin to break down in this context. Clearly this is not a problem for established artists such as Hockney but for many new and aspiring digital artists it presents serious challenges. New technologies and new business models are urgently needed to turn some of the challenges into new opportunities both for artists and collectors.

In the Digital Originals project we are considering ways to add value to digital art and test the associated business models in live field studies:

(1) Authorized Art AppDigital Watermarks: embed information in ways that are difficult to remove. Many variations of this technology already exist but it is usually deployed to support legal action against copyright infringements, for example, tracing the source of an illegally distributed reviewer’s copy of a new film. Using similar techniques it would be possible to create a unique watermark that would relate artworks to particular owners. The digital watermark itself would need to respect the aesthetic of the artist and this would create an interesting space for creativity. The key might include information such as when and where it was created or perhaps even bioinformatic information from the artist. The certification process could take the form of an app which allows users to take a photograph of their artwork and verify a digital signature.

This project is concerned with ways of enhancing people’s experiences of growing older. It will investigate how interactive technologies can promote older people’s engagement with their physical and social environments, and encourage new forms of interaction with younger people. Designers and cross-generational participants will co-design novel interactive devices and situations will be created that challenge age-based stereotyping and encourage younger participants to reflect on ageing. Detailed analysis of participant’s experiences with the devices and systems will provide a rich source of information for the design of future innovative technologies and services and also help specify best practice for involving older people in design.

In the past, most of the research in the area digital support for ageing has focused on older people living in their own homes whereas this project explores communal forms of living for older people. To this we have been working closely with older people living in two sites, A Nunnery, and a Residential Care Home.  Through an extended series of engagements between residents, researchers and designers using innovative experience-centred design methods, we have developed new forms of digital technology which respond to the specific cultures and sites of each group of older people.

Date: Apr 2010 – Dec 2010

Funding: ESRC: Economic and Social Research Council, £73,419

Researchers: Pater Wright (PI), Cas Ladha, Stephen Lindsay, Dan Jackson

Collaborators: Goldsmiths Interaction Research Studio, Mark Blythe (Northumbria University)