Archive

All the projects conducted by the Creative Technology Group and its predecessors, IDEAS and INTERACT Labs and the Computer Graphics Centre.

Historically Media Technology and Computer Graphics (in the shape of the Computer Graphics Centre) focused on research and innovation in computer graphics hardware and software architectures in European Union funded projects such as SPIRIT, SPECTRE, IMAGEN, MONOGRAPH and GRAPHMEM. This activity led the group into the concept of virtual prototyping of graphics hardware architecture in projects such as SHARED and VIPERS, again funded by the European Union.  This research activity was followed by an additional research direction focused on digital heritage, with a notable pioneering EU FP5 project called ARCO — Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects, which was later commercialised in Poland. The ARCO system allows museums to create their own virtual museums and exhibitions independently, building, manipulating and managing digital cultural objects with minimal ICT support. Other digital heritage research has focused on 3D reconstructions of sites, monuments and artefacts with the Victoria and Albert Museum, and on Reanimating Cultural Heritage funded by the AHRC. More recent research activity has focused on projects in the Digital Economy funded by Innovate UK for example the eMove project under the Creative Industries theme and Collaborating Across Digital Industries theme with American Express, again funded by what is now Innovate UK.

Digital Economy

• Connecting virtual communities to the digital economy through micropayment technologies
  

  [White, PI, TSB, £505,613, Mar 2012 - Apr 2014]

  The Digital Hub has been an applied research project founded at the beginning of 2012 with the vision of 'Connecting virtual communities to the digital economy through micropayments'. The Digital Hub was part of a joint venture between American Express and the University of Sussex, supported by Innovate UK. American Express and the University ran the successful American Express Masters Programme (AMP). The Digital Hub strengthens this relationship through research focused on the digital economy, learning about new technologies and developing innovative applications, while engaging with new business opportunities.

• Design for Sharing
  

  [Light, PI, EPSRC Sustainable Society Network+, 2013-2014]

  Design for Sharing was a six month project researching local sharing practices to help design technologies to support local sharing, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Digital Economy strand, through the Sustainable Society Network+. We are now running a day to bring together other researchers and practitioners in this area to share findings and learn more.

  The Design for Sharing  project focused on practices such as sharing spaces, skills, food, transport and objects (like tools). We spoke to people who share formally or informally, who are part of voluntary projects and/or who are running small businesses or social enterprises, irrespective of whether they are using digital technology to do so. At the core of the project were interviews with people in a London suburb to see how they designed opportunities to share across their neighbourhood. In addition to looking at one local area to build up a picture of how people go about sharing and what place it holds in their lives locally, we examined some projects that use digital technology to support sharing or are part of the sharing economy. There is an accompanying report [pdf] and website [http://designforsharing.com]

• Innovating a digital value chain (B2C and B2B fair trade e-tailing system) through Web 3D and Social
  

  [White, PI, SEEDA, £12,000, Mar 2011 - Apr 2011]

  This project focused on introducing a 3D shirt designer into an e-commerce shirt fairtrade e-tailing site for a Bright SME called Lovethatstuff. The projects aims were to:

  • increase market share by allowing customer to input design details for men’s shirts via innovative Web3D and Social Networking E-Commerce technology, view results, and connect with the manufacturing groups; and so feel more involved in the whole fairtrade process;
  • link this new way of working to social networks to both drive marketing, and connect all stakeholders thus distributing the value chain;
  • decrease waste in terms of savings to cotton, water and energy use, and decrease wasted man hours by tailoring the final item to a very defined specification;
  • improve efficiency through this process and thus make the process more profitable;
  • provide an innovative new E-Commerce (E-Tailing) model for other businesses;
  • engage with a large distributor so that this moves from a test case to a large operational project (e.g. with Oxfam or other large NGO probably – LTS already supplies Oxfam with jewellery, etc.)
• Motion in Place (MiPP)
  

  [White, CI, AHRC, £371,131, Mar 2010 - Aug 2011]

  The primary aim of the Motion in Place Platform (MiPP) was to create a coherent set of hardware and software tools to enable explorations of relationships between Place and Movement. More specifically, the tools aim to enable researchers to use digital technologies to generate datasets capturing different forms of movement on, or within a specific site. The project also aimed to provide tools for examining and post-processing this data to gain a better understanding of the relationship between places and the humans who create or inhabit them. 

• Motion capture software services to Animazoo UK
  

  [White, PI, Animazoo, £15,122, May 2011 - Jan 2012]

  This project provided University consultancy services to Animazoo post-closure of the eMove project detailed below. It allowed knowledge transfer between Animazoo and Sussex to continue focused on exploiting eMove project results.

• eMove — Personal Motion Sensing System
  

  [White, PI, TSB, £389,176, May 2011 - Jan 2012]

  This project was a joint collaboration between Animazoo UK and Sussex focused on exploiting advanced microprocessor, PCB engineering, motion sensor technologies and assembly techniques to prototype an innovative, simplified, reduced form factor, upper body hardware animation system priced within the consumer market range. Sussex's role was to develop innovative software to operate this animation system over the internet; including a demonstration application and an SDK (software developer's kit) to allow easy exploitation of the animation system in several different creative industry markets. Our objective was to bring on-line real-time animation to mass consumer and business markets, e.g. video gaming, education advertising, exhibition displays, theme parks, etc. using the internet for remote multi-participant interaction.

Educational technology

• The Ambient Wood Project

  [Rogers PI, EPSRC (EQUATOR IRC), 2002]

  Ambient Wood was a multi-site project, within the learning and playing theme of the Equator IRC, that builds upon the experiences and lessons gained from the Hunting of the Snark project. A playful learning experience was developed where children explored and reflected upon a physical environment that had been augmented with a medley of digital abstractions. A field trip with 'a difference' was created, where children had to discover, hypothesize about and experiment with biological processes taking place within a physical environment.

• Technology Enhanced Learning, animating characters and deforming terrain

  [Paul Newbury and Marco Gilardi]

  Through engaging representations of work in the field, this demo will give an overview of ongoing research in the areas of collaborative video based learning, animating avatars in virtual 3D environments and real-time deformation of 3D virtual terrains, such as a soil deformation simulation.

• PUPPET

  [Rogers CI, EU Espirit-LTR-i3]

  PUPPET was a virtual theatre for 4-8 year-olds, developed as part of the European Union Espirit-LTR-i3 Experimental School Environment Programme, in collaboration with researchers at DFKI Saarbrucken, Germany, LIA University of Aalborg, Denmark and IDAU, University of Aarhus Denmark. It provided an environment where children can learn about narrative in a playful way.

• MEDIATE

  [du Boulay PI, EPSRC]

  MEDIATE was a collaborative project with the University of Birmingham, the Institute of Neurology in London and De Montfort University. It involved the development of a system, the MR-Tutor, that aimed to help radiology trainees learn a systematic method of describing Magnetic Resonance brain images by means of a structured image description language. The training system made use of an archive of cases previously described by an expert neuroradiologist. The system utilises a visualisation method, an Overview Plot, which allowed the trainee to access individual cases in the database as well as view the overall distribution of cases within a disease and the relative distribution of different diseases.

• Ecolab –  Using Jointly Adaptive Metacognitive Software Scaffolding to help children reflect on their learning needs.

  [Luckin PI, EPSRC ]

  The Ecolab software was an interactive learning environment that helps children aged 10-11 years learn about food webs and chains. It provided a flexible environment in the form of a simulated ecology laboratory. It implements both domain level and Metacognitive software scaffolding. The resultant software can assist a learner to take more control for her own extension, which models a learner's developing collaborative skills as well as her developing understanding of the curriculum. All abilities of learners worked well with the software, however less able learners performed particularly well.

• Riddles

  [Yuill PI, EPSRC]

  In the Riddles project, researchers developed and evaluated software using joking riddles containing language ambiguity to help children develop vital comprehension skills. The research formulated new ideas about children's developing awareness of language, and new techniques for improving comprehension that are feasible for use in classrooms.

• ieTV

  [Luckin PI, ESRC/EPSRC  (PACCIT)]

  The Interactive Educational TV project, a collaboration with Open Mind Productions and Channel 4 Learning, explored the potential for this medium in personalising material for particular children and groups of children.

Graphics

• A Mobile Acquisition Tool for Professional Filmmakers
  

  Phil Watten and Patrick Holroyd:. The latest iPhones are capable devices featuring high quality cameras and powerful GPUs. They are good devices for consumer-level photography and, combined with the ultra usability and portability they offer, iPhones are on the verge of being desirable to professional filmmakers. However, the consumer-level functionally is a big barrier to adoption. This new tool uses the number-crunching capabilities of the GPU combined with a user interface specifically design for professional operators to offer the level of control filmmakers demand.

• GRAPHMEM
  

  [Lister, PI, EU, £1,100,000, Jul 96 – Dec 98]

  A European Commission funded project including a Spanish company and Philips Research in the Netherlands. The Sussex work involves developing methodology for integrated logic systems with DRAM and developing an advanced 3D graphics chip using this technology. July 1996 -December 1998. 1,379,000ECU (£1,060,000), nine researchers. Partners: Philips (Netherlands), APD (Spain). An additional 90,000ECU was later granted, taking the grand total to 1,469,000ECU (£ 1,100,000).

• MONOGRAPH

  [Lister, PI, EU, £566,000, Apr 94 – Mar 97]

  A European Commission funded project involving IBM Germany. The Sussex work involves the research and development of advanced integrated macrocell-based graphics rendering system. Prof Paul Lister acted as project coordinator (PC) for this project. Partners: IBM (Germany), Universtät Tübingen (Germany). 

• VIPERS

  [Lister, PI White CI, EU, £409,846, Sep 01 - Feb 05]

  A European Commission IST Framework IV project for the Virtual prototyping of Radio based ASICs. The Sussex work involves virtual modelling of electronic systems. September 2001 – Feb 2005 (£409,846) three researchers.

• SHARED

  [Lister, PI, EU, £140,000, Aug 98 - Dec 00]

  A European Commission funded project involving Universidad Politechnica de Madrid, INDRA and Info Technologies. The Sussex work involves the research and development into software-hardware architecture for rapid evolutionary design. August 1998 – July 2000 (200,000 ECU - £140,000), two researchers.

• OMI Standards

  [Lister, PI, EU, £46,000, Mar 96 - Sep 98]

  This was a contract to undertake a review of on-chip interconnects for OMI. Identifying the roles of the PI-Bus and AMBA bus developments and the global situation in on-chip interconnection buses. March 1996- September 1996, 60,000ECU (£46,000), one researcher. Partners SGS-Thomson (France), OMIMO (Belgium), TODITEC (Belgium), ARM Ltd (UK), Formal Systems (UK), Philips (Netherlands).

• DOMINIC

  [Lister, PI, White CI, EU, £30,000, Jul 96 - Dec 97]

  A User Support Network project for the OMI programme of Esprit. July 1996 - July 1997, 39,000ECU (£30,000), one researcher. Partners ESIM (France), ECSI (France), TGI (Spain), LEDA (France), University of Patras (Greece).

• EUROMIC

  [Lister, PI, White CI, EU, £51,000, Jul 96 - Dec 97]

  This is a European Commission funded project which aims to provide a User Support Network for OMI. The aim is to help European industry use the latest technology in microprocessor based solutions. July 1996- June 1997. 66,000ECU (£51,000), one researcher. Partners CMP (France), FhG (Germany), IMEC (Belgium), OMIMO (Belgium), UPM (Spain).

• IUN2

  [Lister, PI, White CI EU, £24,000, Dec 95 - Feb 97]

  This was a European Commission funded project involving Greek, French, Dutch, Belgium, German and Spanish partners. This involves participation in the OMI Inter-University Network. December 1995-February 1997, 31,000ECU (£24,000), one researcher. Partners UNED (Spain), Archimedes (Greece), CMP (France), IMEC (Belgium), OMIMO (Belgium), TODITEC (Belgium), UPM (Spain).

• SMILE SPARC Macrocells for the European Open Microprocessor Initiative

  [Lister, PI, EU, £378,429, Jun 93 - Jun 95]

  This was a European Commission funded project jointly held with R L Grimsdale and involving partners Matra Harris, France; Philips, the Netherlands; Nordic VLSI, Norway; Sun Microsystems, USA; TGI, Spain and two German Universities. The project concerns the development of a European Microprocessor capability for embedded systems based on the SPARC architecture. The Sussex activity is focused on the production of chip macrocell designs for multimedia applications using displays and image processing. July 1992 - June 1995, (383,000 ECU - £266,429). Two Research Officers. Funding extended June 1993 by 140,000 ECU - £112,000. (Total: £378,429)

• IMAGEN Knowledge-based Modelling for Three Dimensional Scenes

  [Lister, PI, EU, (£198,468, Jan 92- Dec 95]

  This was a DTI/SERC funded project involving Link-Miles and DRA Bedford and jointly held with R L Grimsdale. The generation of terrain for flight simulators, town planning and architectural environments, and environments for virtual reality traditionally involves a great deal of manual modelling. The thrust of this project is to provide an automated method of generating large terrains using a rule based approach to the creation of cultural data onto basic digital map data.

• SPIRIT Technical Workstation

  [Lister, CI, EU, £873,000, Dec 88-Mar 93]

  An ESPRIT contract jointly held with R L Grimsdale from the EC for our contribution to a consortium set up to design 'The SPIRIT Workstation', a high-performance, multi-function technical workstation for Europe and to provide an indigenous graphics workstation capability for Europe. The Sussex contribution focuses on the design of an ASIC for image rendering, distributed rendering software and a VLSI architectures study using advanced CAD techniques for a very high‑performance future version of the workstation. December 1988-December 1992, 765,000 ECU (£512,000). This contract was extended with an additional 300,000 ECU - bringing the total Sussex funding to 1,065,000 ECU - approximately £753,000. Further extended funding in March 1993 of 150,000 ECU - £120,000; total £873,000.

• PRISM

  [Lister, CI, DTI/MOD/SERC, £340,000, Mar 87- Mar 91]

  A SERC grant jointly held with R L Grimsdale from the Alvey Directorate (ARCH/004) for a project entitled 'PRISM-Processors for Real-time Image Synthesis and Manipulation'. This was a large Alvey (DTI/MOD/SERC) project involving GEC Hirst Research Centre and Singer Link Miles Ltd and the VLSI and Computer Graphics Group at the University of Sussex. It was one of the largest in the Alvey VLSI Architecture programme and involved custom integrated circuit design for 3D computer graphics for real time visual systems and a total funding for the consortium of £ 1.8 million over four years.

• Computer Ray Tracing

  [Lister, CI, SERC, £72,540, Oct 88-Sep 90]

  A SERC grant jointly held with R L Grimsdale to investigate 'Computer Architectures for High Performance Image Generation using Ray Tracing'. Ray tracing is a technique for generating photo-realistic images but at great computational cost. This project has investigated approaches to improving the speed at which these images can be generated by using a multiprocessor architecture based on processor clusters and software that exploits dynamic octree building.

• High Speed Visualisation

  [Lister, CI, MoD, £56,000, Oct 84-Dec 87]

  Computer architecture for image generation has been supported by a MoD contract jointly held with R L Grimsdale and D J Watson for 'High-Speed Architectures for 3D Visualisation'.

• Alvey

  [Lister, CI, SERC, £56,000, Oct84 – Sep 87]

  A SERC grant from the Alvey Directorate (ARCH/016) for an 'Investigation into VLSI Architectures for Computer Image Generation and Manipulation'.

• Speech Aid

  [Lister, CI, DHSS, £93,877, Jan 85-Mar 89]

  A research contract from the DHSS 'Portable Programmable Display Based Synthesised Speech Aids'

  Elsewhere, human-centred design researchers have been working on projects such as Face 2 Face funded by the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and TRACE funded by the EPSRC Communities and Culture Network+.  This builds on a long tradition of HCI work at Sussex, represented by the IDEAS and INTERACT Labs of the turn of the century. 

• CRUSADE

  [du Boulay PI, EPSRC]

  The CRUSADE project investigated the way novice programmers of Java employ software visualisation representations for program comprehension and debugging tasks. CRUSADE examined how the co-ordination of these external representations influences 1) the form of the programmer’s mental representations and 2) their comprehension and debugging strategies.

• High Speed Visualisation

  Dynamo – Information access and communications across heterogeneous displays in public spaces

  [Rogers PI, EPSRC, 2000-2003]

  Dynamo was a three-year EPSRC funded collaborative project between Sussex University and Nottingham University concerned with the social, cognitive and technical aspects of ubiquitous computing. It focused on supporting and designing novel forms of interaction. Researchers investigated and developed a number of applications that support and promote cooperative access to and sharing of information in public spaces across heterogeneous display devices (eg PDAs, laptops and interactive displays).

• EQUATOR

  [Rogers CI, Fitzpatrick CI, EPSRC, 2000-2006]

  The EQUATOR project was part of a 10 million pound Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC initiative, funded by the EPSRC. Equator was concerned with innovation and, in particular, exploring the relationship between the physical and the digital - in all walks of life. Eight British universities took part in the IRC, with about 100 researchers and Phd students involved. 

• InTouch

  [Rogers PI, DTI, 2002-2004]

  InTouch was a collaborative project between the Interact Lab, BT / Chimera and Victoria Real, funded by the UK's DTI and ESRC PACCIT initiative. The research investigated the potential for online services to make use of the always-on and high-speed benefits of broadband technology in the home. In particular, it looked at how new homebased services can 'enhance sociality’, including socialising in and beyond the home, to extend people's social opportunities. One InTouch output was a multi-functional, user-customisable communications system which integrated familiar tools like e-mail, chat and text messaging with innovative new ways of representing and maintaining social networks, particularly through new approaches to tagging, associating and storing messages and other media, such as photographs.

• Interpret

  [Luckin PI, EU Information Society Technologies]

  Interpret focused on the design and development of a support tool for brain tumour diagnosis - this used pattern recognition and information visualisation techniques to generate graphic classification overviews of a database of MR spectra of the brain. The work conducted at Sussex involved understanding and defining the users' (neuroclinicians) requirements and designing, developing (in Java) and evaluating prototype user interfaces for the decision support system.

• CACHET — Computers and Children's Electronic Toys

  [Luckin PI, ESRC/EPSRC  (PACCIT)]

  Cachet was concerned with the interactive toys aimed at children between four and eight. The research found that children can co-ordinate multiple interfaces of toy and screen and don't appear to get confused. Indeed, the unique selling point of interaction between the computer and the toy was rarely acknowledged as anything special by the children, although parents found the feature more impressive. All children seemed to enjoy the software, regardless of ability or age, but low level of interest in the toy appeared to be age-related.

Digital Health and Healthy Living

• Visualisation of the Quality of Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research
  

  [Beloff, CI, TSB, April 2011 – October 2012]

  The purpose of this project was to research a possibility of creating an online tool to assess the feasibility of conducting randomised clinical trials (RCTs) for prospective new medicines, based on existing national health records. As a result of this project, this web-based application, see the TrialViz results for more details, is capable of providing in near-real time numbers and location of pools of patients potentially matching given study protocol.

• TRANSFoRm: Translational Research and Patient Safety in Europe
  

  [Beloff, CI, EU FP7 ICT-2009.5.2 ICT for Patient Safety, March 2010 – May 2015]

  TRANSFoRm aims to develop the technology that facilitates a learning healthcare system. TRANSFoRm brings together a highly multidisciplinary consortium where three carefully chosen clinical ‘use cases’ will drive, evaluate and validate the approach to the ICT challenges. The project will build on existing work at international level in clinical trial information models (BRIDG and PCROM), service-based approaches to semantic interoperability and data standards (ISO11179 and controlled vocabulary), data discovery, machine learning and electronic health records based on open standards (openEHR). TRANSFoRm will extend this work to interact with individual eHR systems as well as operate within the consultation itself providing both diagnostic support and support for the identification and follow up of subjects for research. The approach to system design will be modular and standards-based, providing services via a distributed architecture, and will be tightly linked with the user community. Four years of development and testing will end with a fifth year that will be dedicated to summative validation of the project deliverables in the Primary Care setting. For more details see the TransForm project web site.

   

Multisensory Interactions

• SenseX: Sensory Experiences for Interactive Technologies

  [Obrist PI, ERC Starting Grant, EUR 1.5Mio, April 2015 - March 2020] 

  The senses we call upon to interact with technology are still very limited relying mostly on visual and auditory senses. The grand challenge and vision of this project is to gain a rich and integrated understanding on touch, taste, and smell experiences for interactive technologies. We aim to achieve this ambitious grand vision by 1) creating a ‘sensory interaction framework’ on the bases of a systematic empirical investigation of touch, taste, and smell experiences, 2) integrating the generated understanding on the three senses into meaningful and efficient experiential cross-sensory gamuts and interaction principles, and 3) demonstrating the added value of the created experiential understanding on touch, taste, and smell – aka the experiential gamuts – through their integration into the development of multi-sensory systems verifying the short-, mid- and long-term societal and scientific impact (short-term: multi-sensory media experiences; mid-term: interaction concepts for partially sensory impaired people; long-term: multi-sensory interaction approach for life beyond Earth). This research will pioneer novel interaction concepts for interactive technologies in relation to essential components of multi-sensory experiences. This project will transform existing interaction paradigm in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and likewise impact other disciplines such as sensory and cognitive sciences by delivering ground-breaking new insights on the experiential dimensions underlying neurological processes and human perception. Project website: http://multi-sensory.info/

• OWidgets: Design of a new non-existing layer of information delivery through smell

  [Obrist PI, ERC Proof-of-Concept, EUR 149,903, Febr 2017 - Jan 2018]

  The idea for this proposal is to demonstrate the design of olfactory widgets (OWidgets) as a proof-of-concept implementation based on the semantic integration of smell to convey specific information to the user. We will showcase the meaningful design of OWidgets in two distinct markets. Widgets are well established as simple application extensions, integrated in a larger application and usually pre-installed on a device. Widgets allow quick access to information without requiring a user to open the application that manages this information. OWidgets will expand the existing range of widgets and provide users with a new non-existing layer of information delivery through smell, and consequently allow the creation of novel experiences in various application contexts.

• Seeing the World through Sound: Developing Multi-Sensory Technology for Young Blind People

  [Obrist CI, RM Phillips Endownment Fund, £58,955, Dec 2014 - Nov 2016]

  Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) convert visual information into another sensory channel (e.g. sound) to improve the everyday functioning of blind and visually impaired persons (BVIP). However, the range of possible functions and options for translating vision into sound is largely open-ended. To provide constraints on the design of this technology, we interviewed ten BVIPs who were briefly trained in the use of three novel devices that, collectively, showcase a large range of design permutations. The SSDs include the ‘Depth-vOICe,’ ‘Synaestheatre’ and ‘Creole’ that offer high spatial, temporal, and colour resolutions respectively via a variety of sound outputs (electronic tones, instruments, vocals). The participants identified a range of practical concerns in relation to the devices (e.g. curb detection, recognition, mental effort) but also highlighted experiential aspects. This included both curiosity about the visual world (e.g. understanding shades of colour, the shape of cars, seeing the night sky) and the desire for the substituting sound to be responsive to movement of the device and aesthetically engaging.

• Multisensory Technology for Space Exploration

  [Obrist PI, HEIF Kick Start Network Award, £3,000, Nov 2014 - July 2015]

  With this network a dialogue between different organisations and key players concerned with the future prospect of humanity in space was initiated. New contacts were established and a first step was made towards the creation of a research agenda for designing and developing multisensory experiences and technologies in the context of space explorations.

Participatory design

• ASCmeI.T. 

  [Judith Good]

  Although technologically very simple, ASCmeI.T. allows individuals with autism, and their parents and carers, to tell researchers what sorts of technologies they would like to see designed, thus extending the reach of participatory design to the ideation phase and giving individuals with disabilities a stronger voice in the design process.

• Emokno

  [Olivia Thorne and Judith Good]

  Emokno is an interactive toy robot with Natural Language capabilities: it is designed to engage in free form conversations with children with autism, sing songs, tell jokes, etc. It can also express different emotions as a result of children’s utterances to it. The aim is that children will better understand the causes of emotions through interacting with Emokno.

• FireFly Game

  [Pollie Barden and Chloe Varelidi]

  Firefly is a tagging game played in the dark that explores temporal memory and exploits a balance of collaboration and competition. The “Fireflies” are LED badges that flash on and off at various intervals and speeds, based on natural flashing patterns real fireflies exhibit to communicate with each other. Players can only steal a badge when the light is OFF. The players track the “fireflies” while they are lit, but must find and steal them when they go dark. The core goal is to collect as many badges as possible. An additional layer is to collect the firefly badges with the same flashing pattern.
• Effectiveness in Action

  [Light PI, AHRC Connected Communities 2013 - 2014]

  This was a codesign project looking at how people make change in their environments to support, protect or request the community resources they want in their futures. As a co-design project, it involved a team of community and academic researchers who worked closely to ask how people tackle an issue together and why places and practices inspire people enough to continue to act in their name.
  

• Flexible Dwellings for Extended Living (FLEX)

  [Light PI, AHRC Connected Communities 2012 - 2013]

  This was a project addressing an increasing older population that wants to age ‘at home’, but faces the social isolation accompanying the loss of traditional meeting places like pubs, pension queues, community centres. It explored how to make dwellings more socially flexible for people as they age.

• Fair Tracing

  [Light CI, EPSRC, 2006 - 2009]

  This was a three-year participatory design project working with Indian coffee growers and a Chilean Fairtrade wine collective to explore how ethically produced products can be tracked to show provenance and tagged with social media stories to increase their visibility and offer a means for ICT to support small enterprises in developing regions.

Participatory design

• Understanding Multi-sensory needs in EVAs (extra-vehicular activities)

  [Obrist, CI, 2015]

  This was a collaboration between Marianna Obrist and the Bristol Interaction and Graphics Group. The aim of the collaboration was to understand the limitations astronauts face when they interact with the environment through their spacesuit, and to establish a basic understanding of their sensory experiences. As part of these collaborations, a field study at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) was conducted. MDRS is a dedicated facility in which crews of six scientists carry out two-week astronauts-on-Mars simulated missions. 

• F2F — Face 2 Face

  [Howland, CI, ESRC, £133,497, 01/09/2013-01/09/2014]

  The Face 2 Face Project was funded by the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. The project aimed to develop methodological tools for researching the temporal rhythms of children's everyday lives and exploring the movement between face-to-face and online interactions. The study involved a panel of co-researchers aged 12-14 with whom the team developed intensive mobile methods for exploring this movement between online and offline, combining ethnographic observation and technologies for collating and curating digital material.

• TRACE — Trajectories to community engagement

  [Howland CI, EPSRC, £13,430, 08/07/2013-30/11/2013]

  The Trajectories to Community Engagement (TRACE) investigated older people’s experiences of engagement with online and offline communities through interview and survey methods. The project was a collaboration with the University of Brighton and was funded by the EPSRC Communities and Culture Network+: http://www.communitiesandculture.org/projects/873-2/.