We live in an age of burgeoning information, and increasingly fast information access. The WorldWide Web has allowed us to make many positive changes in our society and environment, for example through social networking and e-publishing, but it also presents problems, by its very nature. There is now so much information being spread so quickly that it is becoming impossible for individuals to be aware of enough of it to enable them to take advantage of it.What is more, because of the information overload, we are having to rely more and more on search tools to find what we want. While existing search tools work quite well, after a bit of practice in using them, they are only able to give us information directly matching keywords in what we ask for. This is clearly useful, but its down side is that we are less likely than before to notice peripheral things, situations or people who are relevant to us, in the kind of serendipity or happy accident that led, for example, to the discovery of penicillin. It's becoming harder to notice such connections, partly because we are more narrowly focused in how we search for new knowledge, and partly because the search systems we use are very literal and not imaginative at all.This project aims to design a Serendipity Arena, called SerenA, which will proactively search information available in users' documents and on the Web to identify relevant knowledge and connections related to their work and their environment. The aim is not merely to search for shared keywords, like existing systems, but to use state-of-the-art technology from automated reasoning and computational creativity to identify things that users did not know they needed to know, using more advanced search based on metaphor and analogy. SerenA will be implemented as a physical presence in the working environment, and via personal technology, such as smartphones. With its users' permission, SerenA will proactively search for people and information in a user's local environment, both physically and virtually, allowing it, for example, to suggest that people who don't know each other might find some value in meeting (perhaps because they share an interest in particular aspects of the academic world), or to suggest a paper omitted by keyword search in a particular e-journal (because it has connections with other things of interest to the user who is searching).SerenA will have its own document-analysis technology, but it will also take advantage of the increasingly rich information available via the Semantic Web. The project will include development of a test-bed of information about music and musicology, as an exemplar of an academic field that can benefit from this enabling technology. Importantly, SerenA will have specially designed and carefully validated user interfaces, to make it intelligible to everyone interested in learning and discovery, of whatever kind.SerenA aims to draw man and machine closer together than ever before, enhancing its users' knowledge and their ability to interact with people likely to be important to them.

The TV21 project builds on the work undertaken as part of the AHRC supported Rewind project and takes as its inspiration an earlier project from 1990 called Telly Pieces. The Rewind project is a research project (2004-ongoing), that is providing a research resource to address the gap in historical knowledge of the evolution of electronic media arts in the UK, by investigating specifically the first two decades of artists' works in video. It has partaken in innovative and creative engagements with new audiences and user communities which stimulate pathways to impact. The project has successfully preserved and archived over 400 works by artists' from this period and hosts an online database containing information and ephemera on each work. The original Telly Pieces project was a companion project to a series of artists works commissioned for Channel 4. These works, collectively titled 'Television Interventions' were commissioned for presentation in 1990 at the end of the period covered by the Rewind research project and featured many of the artists who appear in the Rewind archive. The Telly Pieces aspect of the project involved nearly 300 young people from the Strathclyde area working to produce 8 x 4 minute video art works which were featured in exhibitions and festivals internationally. One of the projects was also developed to appear on television alongside the other Television Interruptions. The Rewind research profiled the work of artists exploring a new medium at a time when their practice was extremely innovative and experimental and we now wish to recapture some of the significance of this practice and its creative methods through a series of projects with young people in the City of Dundee. Working with Dundee Contemporary Arts (a large building-based arts centre in the city) - we will introduce the work of these artists through a series of workshops using the Rewind archive which will be aimed at bridging the contemporary and historical approaches to media arts. These workshops will build towards the creation of a body of new works that will echo the experimentation embedded in the methods of these earlier artists. Focused on developing a creative attitude towards new technology that echoes the work of these earlier artists, they will use the concept of creative innovation through technology that is both a creative and ideological action. Knowledge exchange and engagement will be facilitated through working with the DCA's skilled education team who are very experienced in working with a wide variety of people, introducing complex and sophisticated cultural ideas to diverse audiences. The contemporary context will be brought to the project through a foregrounding of the lives of these young people, their technologies and their critiques of the cultural world around them. Works will be created that will echo the personal, political and formal considerations of the earlier work and these will be exhibited in and around the DCA building in its cinemas, exhibition spaces, active on-line spaces and broadcast by BBC Four. They will also be available to view online. Participants will be drawn from the wide user base that already engage with DCA, both through individual relationships as well as organisational connections. DCA has a team of Young Ambassadors - young people who make active programming decisions and provide context and critique to the DCA programme. DCA also has well-established links with many local schools, youth organisations and community centres - many engaging actively with the annual Discovery Film Festival - Scotland's International Film Festival for Young Audiences that takes place at DCA.

The 'Art at the Start' project has been offering arts therapy and creative play sessions to promote the health and wellbeing of parents and 0-3 year old infants within Dundee Contemporary Arts gallery. During our project, we have managed to reach families who don't traditionally visit art galleries and have helped parents who have had difficulties bonding with their children to connect to together with them through shared art making. We have evidenced positive changes in the quality of family wellbeing via questionnaires, interviews and observations of family interactions which focus on the experience of the infant. Our project has been listed as an example of best public health practise and won several public engagement prizes. The proposed research scales up this successful approach, embedding four art therapists within four arts galleries across Scotland to explore whether the 'Art at the Start' model can be successfully repeated in different settings, widening access to arts spaces and supporting parents and infants across Scotland to build secure relationships. The NHS rely on community spaces to help them provide the first line of support for families with young children who are struggling with their wellbeing, but don't yet qualify for urgent clinical care. However, a special task force put together by the government to support parents and infants' mental health recognises that 'community' interventions need to be more sustainably resourced. In order to gain funding, services like ours need a strong evidence base. By bringing together researchers from psychology, arts and arts education, we hope to explore how we can both quantify and qualify the impact of our service; explaining how effective it is, how and where it works, and why. We will do this by gathering information on how people feel before and after engaging with our service, and by exploring which groups of people tend to visit the galleries before and after our out-reach programme. This is important, because access to arts is known to have a protective impact on health and wellbeing, but many marginalised groups in our community struggle to access cultural spaces. Although we have planned how to measure our outcomes, our research programme will also adapt as we go, taking into account the perspectives of gallery staff, local communities and NHS teams gathered in regular 'stakeholder' meetings. At the centre of this 'action research' approach is our art therapy team, who have been trained to reflexively adapt the service they provide depending on their clients' needs and local conditions. This will help us to learn how our service can be adapted to different cultural settings. Our ultimate aim is to showcase to the Scottish Government how we can use the power of the arts to provide a cost-effective solution for public health and wellbeing. Giving children the best start in life is important, because our parents teach us how to interact with others, and the love they provide is essential for us to develop academic and social competence. Poor starts in life can be passed down through generations, and the 'Art at the Start' model offers a way to break this cycle. Since both early relationships and access to the arts have been shown to have protective benefits for health and wellbeing, our intervention stands to have a long-term impact on the lives of the families we reach. To ensure that this powerful impact is heard by those who design and fund parent and infant mental health services, and by the cultural spaces which might host such interventions, we have planned a number of key outputs, including academic papers, a professional magazine article aimed at the gallery sector, and a policy paper summarising the project's outcomes to be presented in person and in writing to gallery, government and NHS teams. This will help us to show how arts and science perspectives can be brought together to present creative solutions to public health problems.

Local civic participation in the UK is typically low, despite many important aspects of our day-to-day lives being determined on a local level. Although there have been some recent attempts to design novel technologies in public spaces that engage citizens, many of these interventions have operated in a top-down fashion, being designed by researchers with content sourced from authorities. This project will investigate how aspects of DIY and hacking cultures can empower citizens to design their own civic engagement technologies that fit their agendas, and to do so in a way that is both sustainable and replicable. We propose that this can be achieved through 'hackathon' events that bring together researchers, members of the public and technology enthusiasts to intensively imagine and prototype new technologies for civic engagement in public spaces and communities. Where hackathons have most frequently been used for developing software, we propose to appropriate this approach as a means for non-technical participants to design and co-create physical computing prototypes. These events will serve dual purposes by 1) acting as a participatory design activity to bootstrap the development of civic engagement technologies that will be trialled and evaluated 'in the wild' with participants; and 2) encouraging further innovation by introducing participants to new technologies and skills and by producing documented tools and processes that other communities can replicate and build upon. The intended outputs of this project will be: an understanding of the attributes of hackathons as a method for engaging community groups in design; an evaluation of situated civic engagement technologies generated through this method; and an exploration of methods for documenting hackathon outputs for other community groups and stakeholders.

Over the last decade, the creative industries have been revolutionised by the Internet and the digital economy. The UK, already punching above its weight in the global cultural market, stands at a pivotal moment where it is well placed to build a cultural, business and regulatory infrastructure in which first movers as significant as Google, Facebook, Amazon or iTunes may emerge and flourish, driving new jobs and industry. However, for some creators and rightsholders the transition from analogue to digital has been as problematic as it has been promising. Cultural heritage institutions are also struggling to capitalise upon new revenue streams that digitisation appears to offer, while maintaining their traditional roles. Policymakers are hampered by a lack of consensus across stakeholders and confused by partisan evidence lacking robust foundations. Research in conjunction with industry is needed to address these problems and provide support for legislators. CREATe will tackle this regulatory and business crisis, helping the UK creative industry and arts sectors survive, grow and become global innovation pioneers, with an ambitious programme of research delivered by an interdisciplinary team (law, business, economics, technology, psychology and cultural analysis) across 7 universities. CREATe aims to act as an honest broker, using open and transparent methods throughout to provide robust evidence for policymakers and legislators which can benefit all stakeholders. CREATe will do this by: - focussing on studying and collaborating with SMEs and individual creators as the incubators of innovation; - identifying "good, bad and emergent business models": which business models can survive the transition to the digital?, which cannot?, and which new models can succeed and scale to drive growth and jobs in the creative economy, as well as supporting the public sector in times of recession?; - examining empirically how far copyright in its current form really does incentivise or reward creative work, especially at the SME/micro level, as well as how far innovation may come from "open" business models and the "informal economy"; - monitoring copyright reform initiatives in Europe, at WIPO and other international fora to assess how they impact on the UK and on our work; - using technology as a solution not a problem: by creating pioneering platforms and tools to aid creators and users, using open standards and released under open licences; - examining how to increase and derive revenues from the user contribution to the creative economy in an era of social media, mash-up, data mining and "prosumers"; - assessing the role of online intermediaries such as ISPs, social networks and mobile operators to see if they encourage or discourage the production and distribution of cultural goods, and what role they should play in enforcing copyright. Given the important governing role of these bodies should they be subject to regulation like public bodies, and if so, how?; - consider throughout this work how the public interest and human rights, such as freedom of expression, privacy, and access to knowledge for the socially or physically excluded, may be affected either positively or negatively by new business models and new ways to enforce copyright. To investigate these issues our work will be arranged into seven themes: SMEs and good, bad and emergent business models; Open business models; Regulation and enforcement; Creators and creative practice; Online intermediaries and physical and virtual platforms; User creation, behaviour and norms; and, Human rights and the public interest. Our deliverables across these themes will be drawn together to inform a Research Blueprint for the UK Creative Economy to be launched in October 2016.