The main aim of the Network is to develop a shared multi-disciplinary vision and research agenda for the the role of makespaces in re-distributed manufacturing. A makespace is a catch-all term for an open access community fabrication workshop. It encompasses Fab Labs, Hackerspaces, Makerspaces and other facilities that can broadly be described as spaces with a suite of fabrication tools and technologies openly accessible for use by a community. The cross-disciplinary network of academic, industrial and policy experts will establish the future place, purpose and philosophy of makespaces within re-distributed manufacturing and investigate key drivers in enabling sustainable re-distributed manufacturing at a grassroots level. Insights will be gained into the opportunities for decentralised manufacturing and product innovation in makespaces, the role of makespaces in local communities and to nearby manufacturing businesses, as part of digital networks and in national and global supply chains. This will initially involve hosting research workshops and public facing discussions with invited experts, conducting research in towns and cities in the UK to map the current and potential interplay between makespaces and manufacturing businesses, waste management companies, education centres, suppliers and retailers. Following this work a set of feasibility studies will be run in order to trial potential opportunities and understand barriers and challenges. These activities together will signpost the research needed to fully explore the role makespaces can play in the future in acting as vital constituent in a rich landscape of re-distributed manufacturing. The Network will publish these research challenges to the wider community. The network will be co-ordinated by Sharon Baurley at the Royal College of Art, who brings extensive experience of working in academia and collaborative research with industry. The network includes a broad spectrum of academics with expertise in industrial design and manufacturing, materials, standards and regulation of emerging technologies, technology and innovation policy, geographies of innovation and technological change, geographies of creative practice, sustainability and environmental impact, urban policy and regeneration, cities and climate change, waste management systems, new economic and business models enabled by the digital economy, interactive cooperative systems, digital innovation and IT as a utility. The network will also include the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) as well as makespaces from across the UK, micro and SME manufacturing businesses, waste management and recycling companies, software developers, technologists and technology developers and GOs and NGOs with interests in craft, design, innovation and manufacturing.

The present project is for a team to spend four months to develop ideas and practical arrangements for a large study of 'social exclusion' and the role of stories in people's lives. The paragraph below describes the project we will be developing. Social exclusion occurs when people fail to take up educational opportunities and employment, and find themselves instead living lives in which anti-social behaviour, crime, and poor health can come to play too large a role. This is a challenge for the communities where social exclusion has come to dominate the social and cultural fabric of life, but it is also a great challenge for society as a whole. "Whose Story?" is a project that aims to make a difference to society's understanding of social exclusion, by placing storytelling and narrative at the centre of its research methods. Our title captures the idea, first, that people living in the grip of social exclusion can feel voiceless and bereft of an identity; and, second, the idea that social exclusion and inclusion can define the same peoples and communities at different times. Our project is alert to communities as places and ways of belonging that have complicated histories. Our emphasis on stories and narratives also works with an important truth: that to tell a story is to share something, and reflect one's self in a network of social and cultural relationships. Storytelling is a form of action that can begin to challenge social exclusion. The data collected from storytelling can tell us a great deal about the terms in which exclusion is felt and understood; it also provides the means of changing behaviours and horizons of expectation. Our project has assembled a team of researchers from diverse geographical locations in the UK, enabling us to construct a representative range of perspectives on exclusion and inclusion in community life; while also, and crucially, providing us with the basis for using action research to connect communities in innovative and beneficial ways. Our team of researchers also comes from diverse academic-disciplinary and practice-led backgrounds: from expertise in medical humanities, the history of psychiatry, community arts organisation, management studies and cultural entrepreneurship; to the more traditional academic disciplines of philosophy, literary criticism and theory, and cultural history. This rich mix of expertise will enable us to develop an innovative range of methods for intervening to improve community connectedness. Our methods will range from quasi-experimental design (a technique widely used in psychological and social scientific experimentation), to critical theories of narrative analysis pioneered by philosophers, theorists and cultural historians such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur and Patrick Joyce. They will be brought together to produce critically innovative interdisciplinary methods of working. Our commitment to using narrative to make a difference and achieve positive social impact is grounded in our commitment to storytelling in cognitive behavioural therapies, where the emphasis is on understanding behaviour with a view to changing it, positively. Our ways of working will be grounded in action research, and we will begin by fully involving our third sector partners and community representatives in the discussion and design of our methods, interventions, and strategies for data collection and analysis.

The proposed research review will look at the contemporary rise of community philosophy groups in the UK and globally, and how individuals and communities use them to enhance well-being, belonging, self-expression and public reasoning. There is growing interest in the idea of philosophy as a way of life that we can practice to live happier and more flourishing lives. But can philosophy really bring people together and create communities, or is it more of a solitary activity? What communities has it created in the past? What forms do community philosophy groups take today? And how could this project encourage their growth? One of the main aims of the research review is to identify and bring together what research exists on community philosophy groups, in order to stimulate future research in this area. At the moment, academic research into community philosophy groups has not been brought together in a single scoping study, with the result that this dynamic area has not received sufficient academic attention. This would be the first comprehensive review of existing academic literature on philosophy groups, and would play a valuable role for future researchers. The project would also have a practical component, and would act as a catalyst for the growth of the grassroots philosophy movement, strengthening ties between academics, think-tanks and philosophy groups; increasing academic and media awareness of philosophy groups; and setting up a new 'philosophy hub' website, with an interactive map to help people find their nearest philosophy group, and to help philosophy groups attract new members. Finally, the project would seek to increase the role of philosophy groups in the British government's 'national initiative on well-being', which at the moment is dominated by a social scientific and technocratic approach. The project would show how philosophy groups empower people to reason their way towards their own definitions of well-being and flourishing, rather than having definitions imposed upon them. Grassroots philosophy groups therefore have an important role to play in making the 'national initiative on well-being' more humanistic, participatory and democratic. The project's collaborative partners include organisations closely involved with the 'national initiative on well-being', including the RSA and the new economics foundation.

Older adults have long been lesser beneficiaries of the digital economy, with many unable or choosing not to adopt digital technologies which do not speak to their particular needs and wants. With COVID-19 spurring societal digitalisation at an unprecedented pace, digitally disadvantaged older adults have been locked out of essential and life-saving services, while others have been made to take up technologies they may be deeply uncomfortable using. As we reimagine society to deal with an ongoing pandemic reality, it is essential that older adults are neither left behind nor forced to make major concessions in their way of life. It is not enough, therefore, to simply improve access to digital technologies. An equitable digital society requires that older adults are welcomed into a digital economy that treats them as first order stakeholders. This project fills this critical need to create a digital society that delivers equal to benefits older adults by: 1) Analysing data on older adults that has been collected over the last 20 years to understand various interrelated and multiplicative factors in older adults' exclusion from the digital economy; 2) Conducting interviews and focus groups with older adults to explore how this period of rapid digitalisation has altered older adults' relationship with digital technologies, focusing on four key areas undergoing important change as a result of the pandemic: Health, Communication, Place, Finance; 3) Co-designing new technology prototypes with older adults to establish a radical new practice which enables older adults to meaningfully participate in creating an equitable digital society; and 4) Creating lasting resources to instill best practice for a digital economy that is inclusive of the full diversity of older adults.

Consumer Experience (CX) Digital Tools for Dematerialisation for the Circular Economy - for the design of a new generation of 'Product Cultures' that promote human wellbeing and people's agency in environmental sustainability The much expounded sustainability strategy of dematerialisation - buying less and extending the life of products - is now starting to gain significant traction in the general consciousness on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our eco-design strategy for dematerialisation is focused on gaining a fine grained understanding of human experience in order to extend 'product offerings' that would decouple the use of material resources from human wellbeing and economic development, by designing experiences and services related to products that include care, update/upgrade, repair, and recycling. The central idea is that by designing experiences and services for products, value that is based on human wellbeing needs can be added to them. We aim to shape new cultures of consumption that will meet the demands of the market for greater sustainability, whilst giving consumers greater agency to respect their environment - becoming custodians rather than consumers. This requires a new relationship between consumers and their products. We believe that experiences and services for products must be constituents of this relationship, hence the challenge is to translate our understanding of needs related to human wellbeing into the design of product-experience-service offerings. We will innovate CX Digital Tools to support experiences and services for physical apparel products that are related to care, repair and update/upgrade in order to keep apparel in use for as long as possible. We will define a set of scenarios and associated technologies for new cultures of CE, by gaining understanding of how social and digital actors (the consumer-public, charity shops, repair initiatives, clothes swapping initiatives, apparel brands, retailers, and digital-electronics hacker communities) come together to enact a CE. We will innovate new sensing and perceptual technologies based on novel computer vision and machine learning architecture to be used by consumers to understand materials and materials degradation, to make decisions of material reparation and to express their perceptions around aged, repaired, updated/upgraded products. We will evaluate user interactions and perceptions derived from scenarios, with a methodological contribution to the evaluation that combines our HCI, social sciences, design and phenomenological approaches. The CX Digital Tools is designed and specified using our Circular Experience Model we have conceptualised, which has four categories: 1) Pre-Ownership; 2) During Ownership; 3) Giving up Ownership; 4) Post Ownership. We will use these four categories to design a set of experiences and services for apparel products that are focused on the human perceptual experience of materials - specifically, materials from waste and recycled materials, ageing and wear, repair, and update/upgrade. We will adopt a Citizen Science approach in order to design and test experiences and services with consumers and stakeholders. Through this approach we will ensure that we are reducing the need to develop new technology products, as we will seek to work with digital technologies that consumers already possess, which forms part of our approach to mitigate environmental impacts both in our research programme as in the outcomes of it. This 30 month project will be led by the Materials Science Research Centre at the Royal College of Art in partnership with UCL - the University College London Interaction Centre, Computer Science Department, and the Knowledge Lab.