This fast-track proposal has been prompted by the continuing suggestions from YouTube viewers of our Periodic Table of Videos (PTOV) that we should extend our scientific coverage to include topical molecules of general interest. PTOV is a website www.periodicvideos.com based on YouTube where viewers can click on any one of the 118 elements and watch a video about that element. PTOV is a collaboration between East Midlands-based freelance video journalist Brady Haran and a team of chemists at the University of Nottingham. Initially completed in July 2008, PTOV has been updated weekly with new videos; some about elements or topical subjects, as well as chemical road trips to Sweden, Ethiopia and the USA. On average, each video has been watched 35-40k times, and two have had > 350k hits; the whole site has attracted more than 7 million hits (excluding multiple viewing by school classes across the world). We believe that PTOV is now one of the most successful science channels on YouTube and it was highlighted in the 2009 EPSRC International Review of Chemistry. Funding for PTOV has come partly from EPSRC with more than matching funds from the University of Nottingham. PTOV has now spawned a sister website, Sixty Symbols www.sixtysymbols.com applying a similar approach to physics. In this Proposal we are seeking modest funding to apply the same approach to the chemistry of molecules, under the provisional name MolVids, with the aim of combining chemically informative videos with an enthusiastic and often humorous tone which we have found to resonate with viewers across the world from primary school age to Nobel Laureates. Specifically, we are requesting funding to support collaboration with Brady Haran, for a macro lens to add to our video camera, and modest consumables for demonstrations that will be recorded for new videos. Life on the internet moves fast, therefore we are seeking fast-track funding so that we do not lose momentum.MolVids is a significant and, we believe, educationally valuable extension of our existing PTOV website. It will enable us for the first time to bring organic chemistry to a wide ranging YouTube audience and will allow us to highlight the chemical problems associated with many of the issues of climate change and sustainability that are currently major concerns of the public in general and young people in particular. The EPSRC International Review of Chemistry commented on the value-for-money of PTOV as a public engagement activity. We believe that MolVids will be equally cost-effective. If we succeed in repeating the viewing figures that we have achieved for our PTOV clips, a conservative estimate suggests that the proposed MolVids should attract 1 million hits within 2 years of the start of the project.

Since its formation in 2000 the MRL has focused on creatively interleaving the physical and the digital for everyday life. We have simultaneously explored new interactive possibilities and developed understandings of how these might be put to use in the real world. Much has changed over last 14 years; some of these changes we have driven, while others we have responded to. When we began our journey, notions of ubiquitous, tangible and mixed reality computing were very much in their infancy, as were potential applications and methods. Our first seven years was therefore concerned with laying the conceptual and methodological foundations for these fields as well as demonstrating potential applications. Much of this was delivered through the Equator Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) that we led until 2007. We then used our previous platform grant to bridge the gap between Equator and the establishment of the Horizon Digital Economy Hub and Centre for Doctoral Training, and also the Orchid programme grant. The subsequent second stage of our journey has focused on driving the widespread adoption of ubiquitous computing as platforms such as smartphones and cloud infrastructures spread into everyday life. Now, as both Horizon Hub funding and Orchid imminently draw to a close in 2015, we need to once again reinvent our research agenda and also ensure our sustainability by bridging any funding gaps as we refresh our grant portfolio. The focus of this next phase will be the overarching challenge living with digital ubiquity? The interleaving of physical and digital that was a distant vision back in 2000, is now becoming a reality for many, with a plethora of devices, from smartphones, to Kinects, to Fitbits allowing us to experience the digital in a bewildering variety of ways. The digital world has become rich, available 24/7, increasingly aware of our physical activities, and populated with our personal data. Ubiquitous technologies that were once considered radical are now becoming an unremarkable feature of our lives. Meanwhile, remarkable new technologies continue to emerge. Technologies for rapidly fabricating physical-digital products or for sensing and actuating the human body raise possibilities for radical new experiences. Our vision of living with digital ubiquity is therefore one of balancing the challenges of living with increasingly mundane ubiquitous technologies, while also enabling people to experience and create extraordinary new experiences. We see this as a productive tension. People must both live in the everyday and yet also seek the profound and creative. It also reflects the essential - and highly creative - tension in the MRL between addressing everyday technology challenges as revealed by ethnographers, while simultaneously engaging with artists and performers to create provocative new experiences. We therefore propose to exploit platform funding to catalyse a step-change in our research by identifying the new research challenges that will arise from living with digital ubiquity, exploring potential approaches to these challenges, developing our key researchers so that they are ready to face them, and forming the partnerships that will help us address them through future research projects. Platform funding will enable us to deliver a programme of exploratory projects, visitor exchanges, and impact projects to explore our vision while also enabling us to retain and develop key staff over the coming critical period.

The exchange of gifts has a long tradition and has been widely recognised as socially important, building bonds and promoting wellbeing. It also brings economic benefits to manufacturers and retailers by driving the sales of products, with the global gifting market predicted to exceed £30 billion by 2021. Digital gifting, giving media (such as music, video, images, games and subscription accounts) as a gift in a digital format online is still in its infancy, but is a rapidly growing sector of the market. Digital gifts, however, fail to be appreciated as gifts as much as their physical counterparts by their recipients, and as such are easily forgotten, and rarely reflected on or reciprocated. Companies are embracing opportunities to provide additional value to tangible products through supporting services, in particular by connecting physical goods to digital services to support customisation or personalisation. For example, physical products are enhanced by augmented reality content overlaid onto them when they are scanned using mobile phones. Researchers have explored how the value of these products has been enhanced through the digital, for example giving second hand goods or musical instruments the ability to tell stories about their past usage. In this project, rather than treating physical and digital gifting separately, we will explore how these new kinds of hybrid products can flexibly support powerful and engaging new gifting experiences. To achieve this, we will engage in two phases of work. Firstly, we will explore different mechanism for combining the physical and digital into hybrid artefacts, and chart the opportunities for customisation to create meaningful personalised gifts. This spans immersive augmented reality applications to run on a mobile phone to Internet-of-Things technologies embedded in new physical objects. By working 'in the wild' with real users, we will refine our designs to derive principles and guidelines to understand how the physical and digital facets of a thing can be combined and customised to add value to one another. Secondly, we will explore how to facilitate the creation and sharing of hybrid gifts with various stakeholders over their lifetime. To do this we will scaffold: producers to make hybrid artefacts; retailers to initially configure them; givers to make and personalise these as gifts for others, give them and follow them afterwards; and for their recipients to unwrap them, enjoy them, reciprocate and ultimately pull them from obsolescence by re-gifting, recycling or repurposing. This project brings together expertise in Human Computer Interaction and Pervasive Computing from researchers at Nottingham's Mixed Reality Laboratory with design researchers at the Loughborough Design School. Our work aims to create opportunities for UK companies to innovate new products and services in the global marketplace. Through collaboration with our industrial partners we will explore how a range of different types of product might become hybrid gifts: fast-moving-consumer-goods such as bath product gift sets that could be coupled to a music track to create a multisensory experience; hand-crafted high-value artisan products such as jewellery that are enriched with stories about how a piece was made, reflections on why it was chosen by the giver and images of it in use by the receiver; and luxury food gifts such as chocolate that include information about the ingredients but also a personal message from the giver to create an enhanced unwrapping experience. We will create, give, enable, sell and study these new products to understand their use and value, and generate a gifting toolkit to support this process for use by the community.

In a British context, and with significant exceptions, WWI still focuses largely on the white British armed forces active on the Western Front. While it is possible to subject the events of 1914-18 to disinterested and objective historical inquiry, the commemorative landscapes and rituals created after 1918, and reaffirmed each year in the UK and on the Western Front, tend to prevent a broader understanding of WWI as a global conflict that has continuing relevance for all communities in an increasingly cosmopolitan British society. This includes those for whom the Western Front, and the conventional British narratives associated with it, have limited significance. Many Indians fought on the Western Front, but people from different parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Ukraine, Russia, and Poland are likely to focus more strongly on the fallout from the collapse of the Russian Empire 1917-22, and the subsequent emergence of new nations in central and eastern Europe after 1918. People of the Balkan states may be more interested in the post-1912 wars which essentially led to Yugoslavia, the fall of the Habsburg monarchy and the emergence of a stronger Greece. Turkey's participation in WWI led to the destruction of the Ottoman Sultanate and the creation of the modern Republic of Turkey. The Irish have yet a further perspective on these years. The centrality of WWI to British identity has been reaffirmed by the UK government's ambitious £60 million programme to mark the centenary in 2014-18. The explicit objective is to remind the next generation 'that the First World War is not ancient history but a shared history that unites our country'. What of the many communities which have settled in Britain during the 20th century? Are they (intentionally or unintentionally) excluded? Some families have lived in Britain for several generations but do not necessarily feel any sense of engagement with previous commemorative events. The proposed Centre aims to identify and facilitate imaginative democratic community action and engagement around the memories and narratives of the period 1914-18 within the diverse communities which make up contemporary British Society. Initially the Centre will take advantage of its location and work with three, large cosmopolitan cities in the English East Midlands region: Nottingham, Leicester and Derby. These three cities have distinctive but comparable industrial heritages, and through the 20th Century experienced sustained immigration from all parts of Europe, the Commonwealth and elsewhere. From this foundation, and utilizing community networks, we aim to expand our community partnerships to achieve a national reach. The Centre will be led by a cross-disciplinary network of academics from across the Arts and Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Information Technologies. The University of Nottingham and its partners in the Centre have a strong track record of working with community groups and our key mechanisms of engagement will include a comprehensive programme of community-focused events (themed roadshows, research surgeries, talks and training) co-ordinated by an experienced Community Liaison officer. Access to research expertise will be facilitated by two funding schemes: (i) a Community Challenge Fund to support community groups to gain access to training, facilities and expertise to assist the development of community-led programmes and support the development of bids to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) schemes; and (ii) a Research Development Fund, aimed at extending the potential of a community-led HLF project or funding follow-up activities to further develop a completed HLF project. Mechanisms of engagement through events, and the funding schemes, will encourage fresh approaches to collaborations through the involvement of community theatre practitioners, community film makers and the novel use of technology through the UoN's digital research centres (e.g. Horizon).

The arts and humanities have a strong tradition of building, maintaining and using archives as part of their research. The creative industries also exploit archives, but refer to them as databases of assets from which they generate experiences for public audiences. In turn, social media now enable these audiences to contribute back to archives by commenting, tagging, annotating and uploading their own media. Our proposal addresses the potential for a productive collision of archives, assets and audiences to the benefit of all concerned by bringing together academics with the creative industries, and engaging both with diverse audiences. In order to drive this vision forward, we will focus on industrial heritage as a target sector of the creative industries, specifically on the three themes of i) enlightenment and innovation; ii) cultures of work, welfare and play; and iii) the rise, fall and re-invention of industry. This focus builds on the rich heritage of our region; the expertise of our three university partners, Nottingham, Leicester, and Nottingham Trent; and the interests and resources of a wide network of industry and cultural partners. Our objectives are to engage external partners, grow our capacity for knowledge exchange, deliver a portfolio of demonstrator projects, and ensure the future sustainability of our approach. We will achieve this through a year-long programme of engagement activities (theme launch days and a final symposium); mobility and training activities (knowledge exchange fellowships and student internships); feasibility projects; and sustainability activities (ingenuity and reflection workshops). As part of our programme we will work with the REACT Hub in particular to complement their Heritage Sandbox currently underway but which will have concluded by the start of our programme. The Director of REACT, Prof. John Dovey, will sit on the steering group to aid complementarity and shared learning.