Domestic environmental technologies (DETs) such as solid wall insulation, ground source heat pumps and rainwater harvesting have an important role to play if the UK is to meet its environmental objectives around carbon emissions, water conservation and energy use. Many such technologies are cost effective and simple to install, and schemes such as the forthcoming Green Deal make them financially possible for more people. However, if they are to become widely adopted they must be seen as a 'social norm' within communities. An effective way to do this is to encourage interaction between 'local experts' who have installed such technologies, and their neighbours. In this way, best practice can be spread through a community. Digital technology can be used to promote this, by providing information about local experts, mediating communication, creating enjoyable games through which people interact, and rewarding those who contribute their time. This project will work with Bristol Green Doors, a community interest company which promotes events to support communities in shared learning around DETs, to develop and assess a set of distributed mobile services to inform, entertain and engage local community members in sharing best practice. It will also look at how local business recommendations that emerge from such sharing can be tracked and assessed for effectiveness, and so potentially monetised in an online business model. The project will investigate (i) whether and how digital technology can be used to catalyse the spread of best practice within communities, and (ii) whether and how this results in a demonstrable impact on the local economy which can be digitally tracked. It's four objectives are: A. Understand how best-practice sharing around DETs currently takes place in the community, what barriers there are, and what ideas stakeholders have for improving it. B. Develop in collaboration with the community a set of distributed services to support best-practice sharing and recommendation tracking. C. Assess the effectiveness in spreading best practice, acceptability to the community, and impact on local business of different feature sets and functionality the distributed services provide. D. Assess the project with regard to generality of lessons and insights; identify both general and more situation-specific learnings for use in digital enablement of community best-practice sharing and the stimulation of local business. The resulting services will be deployed in the Bristol area by Bristol Green Doors, resulting in increased engagement with DETs by the community. The service platform will be released open source, for use by other organisations involved in community engagement with DETs, and training will be provided through engagement workshops and documentation. The more general research results will be shared with businesses, policy makers and community organisations interested in the spreading of best practice within communities through workshops and publication in both academic and popular venues.

REACT: Research & Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technologies. Knowledge Exchange gets lost in translation. Creative Economy demand and Arts and Humanities research culture too routinely fail to understand each other. They can seem to work to different rhythms and values. But they do and they must match, and they must talk, urgently. We will make that happen. REACT will engineer the radical change needed through its unique partnership with a leading Creative Economy broker, Watershed, pioneering a new model of dynamic creative interaction: Sandbox. REACT will match Creative Economy demand with Arts and Humanities excellence, creating sustainable partnerships that will provide significant economic and societal impacts, generating a transformative shift in capacity and HEI cultures at all levels. We will bring two cultures together and lead the necessary process of organisational change. Within four years we will have demonstrated the value of sustained tight integration of the CE sector and AH communities, and secured national and international recognition for our agile mechanism for dynamic knowledge exchange. The REACT Hub is a collaboration between the University of the West of England, Watershed Arts Trust, and the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter. It reaches across two dynamic UK regions, and uniquely across three cultural areas and two languages and creative economies. It brings together Arts & Humanities research from fields as diverse as Archaeology, Architecture, Classics, History, English, Welsh, Translation Studies, Performance, Media and Cultural Studies, Design, Music, Computer Science and Digital Technologies. REACT will offer researchers the chance to work with Micro businesses and SMEs, technology partners from either the commercial sector or the partner HEIs and larger scale Cultural Economy and Cultural Industry partners who have an interest in new creative content, and assets to exploit in partnership with academics. REACT will bring together high quality academic research with creative technology partners to developing innovative ways of engaging audiences. Creative economy partners will have the opportunity to develop new delivery platforms and researchers will be able to engage with audiences in new ways. REACT Universities have teamed up Bristol's Watershed Media Centre to adapt their ground breaking innovation development programme, Sandbox, for working with academic researchers. This programme is supported by the University of Exeter's Innovation Fitness Test offering participating Creative Economy partners the chance to strengthen their market potential. Watershed's Sandbox brings together production teams around themed cohorts to make practice based prototypes; production teams follow a common timetable of development and testing, sharing their learning with one another across the cohort. This proven method aggregates ideas, talent and resources harnessing powerful outputs from diverse cross disciplinary inputs. See http://www.theatresandbox.co.uk/2010-evaluation/ for an evaluation of the 20101 Theatre Sandbox scheme.