Museums and other heritage institutions often invite their visitors to contribute content to museum collections and exhibitions for a variety of purposes: to gather feedback and assess the effectiveness of their exhibitions, to enrich their collections with first-hand accounts of experiences with their objects, or simply to engage their audiences in interactions with their contents at a deeper level. Such examples date almost a century back, however, the whole notion of visitor-generated content has taken on completely new meaning with the advent of the social web. Users of the social web (including social networking sites, blogs, wikis, etc.) increasingly expect to be asked for their opinions and comments and to be offered opportunities to actively contribute rather than passively consume online content. Heritage institutions are already responding to this with a variety of projects that seek content from their online and/or on-site audiences. However, the sector yet lacks best practices for these projects to draw upon in order to tackle the many ethical and practical challenges of soliciting, using and disposing of visitor content. It is now critical to bring these projects together under a dedicated and structured forum to exchange experiences, to identify critical issues and challenges, to map future research agendas, and to encourage good practice. This network will provide this forum through four structured events, which will focus on the following topics: - The Shape of Things: New and Emerging Technology-Enabled Models of Participation through visitor-generated content - "It's my content 2.0" - IPR, ownership and ethics - "But it's my content too" - Democracy, trust and moderation - The Shape of Things to Come The events are intended to delineate and advance the debate over visitor-generated content versus institutional content as well as to unveil possible synergies. In doing so, they will contribute significantly to our understanding of the issues and challenges involved in integrating visitor content within heritage institutions, and will advance our practices and approaches.

Many hospital trusts and other healthcare organisations have invested in arts programmes, via the installation of art works in hospital spaces, artist residencies and the development of enrichment activities such as dog patting and music workshops. Research has shown that these interventions have a positive effect on patient wellbeing, including mental health, anxiety, pain intensity, need for medication and length of stay in hospital. The research has also shown a positive effect for staff training and development. To date there has been no research regarding the potential benefits of providing access to collections in hospitals, despite the fact that the majority of museums have active outreach programmes and are vigorously encouraged to widen access to their collections, particularly for excluded audiences. \nThe aim of this research is to understand the potential and value of taking handling collections from museums, libraries and archives into hospitals and other healthcare organisations, such as care homes. Preliminary research begun at University College London Hospital by the applicants, has shown that object handling sessions resulted in an increase in patient wellbeing and patient's perception of their health status. Further, that patients felt positive about the role of object handling sessions as a distraction from everyday ward life and sessions have a positive impact on relationships amongst staff and patients. Importantly the pilot research has highlighted the deep emotional responses evoked in hospitalised patients handling museum objects. Whilst this may be highly beneficial, the full psychological impact on patients and professionals leading the sessions needs to be carefully assessed.\nThe main objective of the research is to develop an effective and robust protocol for heritage engagement with health, based on thorough research. The protocol will include guidelines for best practice, examples of effective session development and delivery, and guidance on establishing new relationships with healthcare organisations. The research will fully evaluate the psychological and physical impact of object handling on patients, including the role of such sessions on staff and those individuals delivering sessions. Research Assistants will collect, analyse and evaluate data obtained from handling session and will address questions such as: How do different patients respond to handling sessions? Are there trends in which type of objects are preferred in handling? Do differences in the profession of the individual leading the session affect the outcomes? What intrinsic factors are important in the development and delivery of an effective object handling session? \nA freelance artist will explore the creative element of patient object handling sessions. Working with patients, relatives, volunteers, hospital and heritage staff the artist will interpret the research for a broader audience seeking to promote the positive benefits of object handling. This aspect of the research will result in material developed by the artist for exhibitions and displays, culminating in virtual on-line exhibitions, accessible via the project website. The artist will address the question: What are the creative outcomes of heritage enrichment in hospitals?\nData from a variety of institutions from across the UK will be used to gain an overview of the role of object handling. Seven partner organisations including The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, hospitals, a national museum, plus local authority, university and independent museums, libraries and archive services will provide data and information from sessions conducted at regional hospitals and other healthcare organisations. Using a standard methodology to be developed by the project team, partners will work closely with the Research Assistants and Artist to collate data and establish a broad view of the potential, value and benefits of embedding heritage in healthcare.

This unique consortium draws on the research excellence of interdisciplinary and complementary design innovation labs at three universities - Lancaster University, Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art and connects it with public and private sectors, linking large and small-scale businesses, service providers and citizens. Together, our expertise in developing and applying creative techniques to navigate unexplored challenges includes that of designers, artists, curators, producers, broadcasters, engineers, managers, technologists and writers - and draws on wider expertise from across the partner universities and beyond. The Creative Exchange responds to profound changes in practice in the creative and media-based industries stimulated by the opening of the digital public space, the ability of everyone to access, explore and create in any aspect of the digital space, moving from 'content consumption' to 'content experience'. It explores new forms of engagement and exchange in the broadcast, performing and visual arts, digital media, design and gaming sectors, by focusing on citizen-led content, interactive narrative, radical personalization and new forms of value creation in the context of the 'experience economy'. The primary geographic focus is the Northwest of England centred around the opportunity presented by the growth of MediaCityUK and its surrounding economy. The three universities act as local test beds with field trials in London, Lancaster and Newcastle prior to larger public facing trials in the northwest. This will support the North West regional strategy for growth in digital and creative media industries, whilst generating comparative research and development locally, nationally and internationally. The Creative Exchange has been developed in response to a paradigm shift in content creation and modes of distribution in a digitally connected world, which has profound impact for the arts and humanities. This transformational-change is taking place within the landscape of a growing digital public space that includes archives, data, information and content. How we navigate and experience this space - and how we generate content for and within it - is central to how we create economic, social, cultural and personal value. The Hub draws on new and agile approaches to knowledge exchange for the creative economy that have been previously developed by the partner universities and new ones co-developed with specialist arts organizations, sector organizations and communities of users.

The digital games industry has global revenues of $65bn (in 2011) predicted to grow to $82bn by 2017. The UK is a major player, whose position at third internationally (behind the US and Japan) is under threat from China, South Korea and Canada. The £3bn UK market for games far exceeds DVD and movie box office receipts and music sales. Driven by technology advances, the industry has to reinvent itself every five years with the advent of new software, interaction and device technologies. The influential 2011 Nesta "Next Gen" review of the skills needs of the UK Games and Visual Effects industry found that more than half (58%) of video games employers report difficulties in filling positions with recruits direct from education and recommended a substantial strengthening of games industry-university research collaboration. IGGI will create a sustainable centre which will provide the ideal mechanism to consolidate the scientific, technical, social, cultural and cognitive dimensions of gaming, ensuring that the industry benefits from a cohort of exceptional research-trained postgraduates and harnessing research-led innovation to ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of innovation in digital games. The injection of 55+ highly qualified PhD graduates and their associated research projects will transform the way the games industry works with the academic community in the UK. IGGI will provide students with a deep grounding in the core technical and creative skills needed to design, develop and deliver a game, as well as training in the scientific, social, therapeutic and cultural possibilities offered by the study of games and games players. Throughout their PhDs the students will participate in practical industrial workshops, intensive game development challenges and a yearly industrialy-facing symposium. All students will undertake short- and longer-term placements with companies that develop and use games. These graduates will push the frontiers of research in interaction, media, artificial intelligence (AI) and computational creativity, creating new game-themed research areas at the boundaries of computer science and economics, sociology, biology, education, robotics and other fields. The two core themes of IGGI are: Intelligent Games - increasing the flow of intelligence from research into digital games. We will use research advances to seed the creation of a new generation of more intelligent and engaging digital games, to underpin the distinctiveness and growth of the UK games industry. The study of intelligent games will be underpinned by new business models and research advances in data mining (game analytics) which can exploit vast volumes of gameplay data. Game Intelligence - increasing the use of intelligence from games to achieve scientific and social goals. Analysis of gameplay data will allow us to understand individual behaviour and preference on a hitherto impossible scale, making games into a powerful new tool to achieve scientific and societal goals. We will work with user groups and the games industry to produce new genres of games which can yield therapeutic, educational and social benefits and use games to seed a new era of scientific experimentation into human behaviour, preference and interaction, in economics, sociology, psychology and human-computer-interaction. The IGGI CDT will provide a major advance in an area of great importance to the UK economy and massive impact on society. It will provide training for the leaders of the next generation of researchers, developers and entrepreneurs in digital games, forging economic growth through a distinctly innovative and research-engaged UK games industry. IGGI will massively boost the notion of digital games as a tool for scientific research and societal good.