Creative Industries

This workshop was held at the Commonwealth Club on 29^th May. The speakers at the first workshop were Nicola Smyth of the Research and Innovation Department of the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/index.shtml), Mina Mileva, a freelance animator, and James Wallbank of Access Space (http://access-space.org/?c=overview).

The discussions were organized around the following 6 topics:

• Identifying the scope of the research area;
• The methods, skills, techniques and methodologies for conducting the research
• Social challenges
• Technical challenges
• Forms of exchange
• Scenarios

Some of the issues that have emerged from the discussion are the following:

• User generated content and associated technologies are bringing about a blurring of boundaries between designer – creator/producer – consumer. This has effects on all aspects of content production and consumption / reception, ranging from relatively ‘internal’ questions of forms, structures, styles, genres, and so on, to the broader social and economic questions of ownership and intellectual rights.
• What different forms of value are at work in the digital economy, and how might they be researched? For example quantitative methods will only relate to quantitative value; but are there other forms of value and how could they be researched?
• Academic funding models are seen to be far too slow for the tempo of the creative industries. Funding models that are able to respond more quickly, and short-term funding structures are needed if academic research is to feed into creative industries.
• Temporal aspects: how does the much faster turn around between production and consumption, publication and response, and in the development of applications and technologies affect creative content.
• Historical aspects: in order to understand the extent to which current developments are really new and innovative, and in order to understand what effects current innovations may have, they need to be seen against the history of cultural production in this area.
• Spatial issues: how do relations between the local and the global change through the use of UGC and related technologies. What do people come together to do in the same space, as opposed to or assisted by access to UGC?
• Creativity and ownership: how are creations / outcomes related to ownership / authorship in a world where content is so easily replicable? What forms of ownership, besides economic, are recognised or are developing; how do artists benefit from STS?
• STS is often used for reputation building. How is reputation related to identity, to trust, to authority and to authenticity?
• What are the different forms of user generated content? For example, how does tagging operate as a social phenomenon, and how different is it from other forms?
• What are the legal issues related to the creation of UGC such as mash-ups? There is a need to propose and test different copyright and licence models.
• In order to understand the extent to which UGC is bringing about social change or transformation, it will also be necessary to understand the power structures around this form of content in the creative industries: for example, does it in fact lead to greater ‘democracy’ (and what would that mean in this area?), does it extend the domain of creativity to people who would otherwise be excluded? How does it reshape the landscape of creativity which has always flourished in both institutional and non-institutional places? Does it provide greater access to creative goods?
• The main technical challenges identified were: creating resources for atomisable, re-identifiable content; service-oriented architectures; integrating multi-modal content; managing digital rights; tracking provenance and past use of content
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Transport

This was held on 4^th July at the Manchester Town Hall. Speakers for the day were John Urry on post-car systems, Kingsley Dennis and Daniela Sangiorgi on scenarios and new service models, Drew Hemment on art and design interventions, and Martin de Heaver, Executive Director of Capital Project Consultancy, and head of its Transport and Infrastructure Division.

This workshop included a technology market and context exchange, for which each participant was invited to bring a poster describing work that they had done in the area. Discussions were grouped around the following questions:

What are the key features of the emerging digital technology?

What is the digital economy and what is transport?

What are the challenges and opportunities of a digital economy in transport?

Why do you care, what can you contribute and what would you like to do?

Research Centres: what should they do, who should be in them?

Key examples

Some of the main issues to emerge from this workshop were the following:

• How to use STS to enable people to make better transport decisions: where better could mean more efficient (faster, less traffic, etc.) or more sustainable and ecological.
• Could STS be used to make more sustainable forms of transport more attractive?
• Could STS be used to create substitutes for travel, for example, by facilitating ‘transitional communities’?
• Differences between rural and urban communities in the way they use both STS and transport and how these could mesh? What might the impact on local communities be, and what form of research is needed in order to answer this question?
• How to create integrated multi-modal and seamless networks of information to inform and direct transportation flows?
• What is the importance of cultural context, social criticism and urban planners (‘imagined futures’) in understanding the link between STS and transport?
• How can STS be used for public engagement to meet transport goals?
• What kinds of new service models might work?
• What issues relating to privacy and social control emerge from the information relating to people’s movements in transport systems?
• How can appropriate links be forged between healthcare provision and transport options?
• Mobile technologies and devices
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Health Workshop:

This workshop was held at BMA House in London on 4^th of July. There were 30 participants. The speakers were Aviv Katz, from Engine, who spoke about the ‘Health Connect’ project (a project to connect medical appointments with transport options for elderly or disabled people); Shirley Large of NHS Direct who spoke about the use of online resources to support information and communication about contraception, and Mark Jones, of Animal Agentz, who spoke about the development of a site with a number of visualisations to help children through stressful hospital procedures. David Wallom, presented the main research objectives that are emerging from the e-Health Research Cluster (one of the 9 other Research Clusters funded by the EPSRC).

The workshop discussion was organised allowing for discussion in groups ranging from pairs to sixes, at each stage addressing a specific task. The final discussion involved groups addressing a specific research area with a specific definition, challenges and opportunities, and a list of ways to address those.

A summary of each of the areas is given here (points specific to each area have been picked out in order to avoid repetition).

1) Research area: Effective integration and assessment.

Definition:Demonstrably effective integration of information across proliferating mechanisms and devices providing an end-to-end perspective on health care delivery

           

Main challenges/opportunities

There is a multiplicity of devices and sources

Differential / structured information.

How to address these:

We need pilot projects to assess and learn standards

Do not let the technology drive the agenda

Near-to-user research, design with not for

2) Research area: Control (rights and access)

Definition: What new issues over access to information exchange are raised by STS and can we identify newly emerging models?

            Main challenges/opportunities

            Mobile data storage; ‘trusted’ data stores;

            New service spaces (affecting how information is produced and exchanged)

            New health care policy and research

            IPR relationship – gift relationship

How to address these:

Harmonising jurisdictions; harmonising healthcare schemas

Allowing for degrees of control

New research in law, policy, sociology

3) Research area: Supporting individuals and communities of practice

Definition: What mechanisms support individuals and communities of practice to achieve integration, flexibility and embedding knowledge to support wellbeing?

Main challenges / opportunities

Cost vs effectiveness (what benefits and for whom?)

What kind of technology or combinations of technology

How to have informed, situated, available, usable technologies when needed.

How to overcome the resistance to change?

Medical vs user view (whose knowledge counts?)

Missing voices

Managing agreement among members of communities of practice (how to ensure that there is a common language)?

How to address these?

Generating new models of evaluation

Developing or scaling up existing STS

Doing a pilot at the service level

User-centred design

Usable / meaningful technology embedded in current practices

Using STS for democratic debate, bringing in ‘missing voices’.

Identifiying communities of practice and understanding the dynamics of communities of practice

4) Research area: Gearing Research

Definition : Co-ordinating different paces of research and practice so we can be responsible, take risks and fail faster whilst allowing for reflection and analysis.

Challenges & opportunites / How to address these:

User engagement

Measuring outcomes / observing experiences

Putting the focus on wellness

Existing funding structures

Academic incentives

Overcoming institutional inertia

Sustaining post-collaboration relationships

How to address these:

We need to re-think the methods used for user engagement

A combination of visualising methods and participation can be used to understand outcomes and to observe experience.

Wellness focus requires a view of the whole, and a long view.

Alternative funding models must be sought: models for sustainability, that draw on a variety of sources (government, corporate, charity, lottery, etc). Managing projects in a portfolio

There needs to be an openness to ‘plan c’: ie. Being ready for your first plans to fail.

Institutional inertia can be addressed by communities of practice, and by linking practice to research.

In order to sustain post-disciplinary collaboration, envisage collaboration as an action field and not just a talk shop, enabling experimentation.

5) Research area: Trust / knowledge / privacy

Definition: How do people share and access health information in STS communities? How do they constitute trust, privacy and knowledge systems and how can we inform this process?

Opportunities and challenges:

Patient empowerment and support

Practitioner support

Research development

Understanding the risks and benefits

Understanding the engendering and breaking trust

Understanding the evolution of trust

What health care information do people trust and why?

What constitutes transparency in this domain?

How much information is too much information?

Digital (and) health literacy

Understanding privacy choices and awareness

How to address these:

Business models that take into consideration value and risk to stakeholders

Ethnographic studies – but with a faster turn over

Learning to cope with provisional results

Developing a continuous evolution model for the relationship between research / design and practice

Harnessing the technologies that are emerging specifically to analyse STS

Bringing on board the expertise of health practitioners, health economists and marketers

6) Research area: Changing cultures (Renamed ‘Health Prisons’ by the group)

Definition: A culture changed to be of informed, well and well-behaved citizens. Informed about medical and health processes and about technology. Able to participate confidently in the ‘safing’ of information and the management of socio-political consequences.

Challenges / opportunities

Understanding changes in professional practice: eg doctor-patient relationships

Understanding changes in rights and responsibility (what constitutes appropriate citizenship, expectations from clinicians of the well informed patient)

Understand implications in how treatment is delivered

Effectiveness of increased knowledge and patient treatment

Compare online therapy and face to face

How to address these:

Case studies, trials, controlled experiments, participant observations, organisational studies.

A general comment by this group (and echoed by others in the discussion): ‘We question the premise that more knowledge and information is necessarily good’

Trans-research area questions, problems, suggestions

Health Credit System and other forms of motivation

Creating new ways for engaging with and for people who experience difficulties with communication (due to social exclusion or disability)

Control, ownership and responsibility for health

Patient / expert patient

Cross-cutting issues:

This is an outline of issues that seem to be emerging across the three sectors of Creative Industries, Transport and Health. This is a first step at synthesising the outputs of the three workshops, and is not exhaustive. Please feel free to expand as you see fit!

• Intellectual property issues: Digital rights management, copyright, ownership and access. This emerged very strongly both in creative industries and in health care
• Concepts of trust, reputation and identity. This was a very strong theme that emerged throughout the discussions and requires full unpacking.
• Managing ‘data haloes’ that people are acquiring through different tracking devices, online activity, data stores, etc.
• Integrating different forms of content: for example, multi-modal content (visual, auditory, textual, but also relating to different forms of transport, different ways of gathering information, different devices)
• Understanding and supporting patterns of information discovery, retrieval and storage.
• Alternative funding models: the funding models of traditional academic research do not meet the needs of the community that the Digital Economy Programme aims to serve.

Further cross-cutting issues:

• Theory – technology – practice relationship
• Need for new service models
• Need for behavior change
• Appropriate models of social research
• Need for new ‘post-disciplinary’ methods

Next steps are now being considered. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know.