The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018 highlighted the need for urgent, transformative change, on an unprecedented scale, if global warming is to be restricted to 1.5C. The challenge of reaching an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 represents a huge technological, engineering, policy and societal challenge for the next 30 years. This is a huge challenge for the transport sector, which accounts for over a quarter of UK domestic greenhouse gas emissions and has a flat emissions profile over recent years. The DecarboN8 project will develop a new network of researchers, working closely with industry and government, capable of designing solutions which can be deployed rapidly and at scale. It will develop answers to questions such as: 1) How can different places be rapidly switched to electromobility for personal travel? How do decisions on the private fleet interact with the quite different decarbonisation strategies for heavy vehicles? This requires integrating understanding of the changing carbon impacts of these options with knowledge on how energy systems work and are regulated with the operational realities of transport systems and their regulatory environment; and 2) What is the right balance between infrastructure expansion, intelligent system management and demand management? Will the embodied carbon emissions of major new infrastructure offset gains from improved flows and could these be delivered in other ways through technology? If so, how quickly could this happen, what are the societal implications and how will this impact on the resilience of our systems? The answer to these questions is unlikely to the same everywhere in the UK but little attention is paid to where the answers might be different and why. Coupled with boundaries between local government areas, transport network providers (road and rail in particular) and service operators there is potential for a lack of joined up approaches and stranded investments in ineffective technologies. The DecarboN8 network is led by the eight most research intensive Universities across the North of England (Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York) who will work with local, regional and national stakeholders to create an integrated test and research environment across the North in which national and international researchers can study the decarbonisation challenge at these different scales. The DecarboN8 network is organised across four integrated research themes (carbon pathways, social acceptance and societal readiness, future transport fuels and fuelling, digitisation, demand and infrastructure). These themes form the structure for a series of twelve research workshops which will bring new research interests together to better understand the specific challenges of the transport sector and then to work together on integrating solutions. The approach will incorporate throughout an emphasis on working with real world problems in 'places' to develop knowledge which is situated in a range of contexts. £400k of research funding will be available for the development of new collaborations, particularly for early career researchers. We will distribute this in a fair, open and transparent manner to promote excellent research. The network will help develop a more integrated environment for the development, testing and rapid deployment of solutions through activities including identifying and classifying data sources, holding innovation translation events, policy discussion forums and major events to highlight the opportunities and innovations. The research will involve industry and government stakeholders and citizens throughout to ensure the research outcomes meet the ambitions of the network of accelerating the rapid decarbonisation of transport.

This unique consortium draws on the research excellence of interdisciplinary and complementary design innovation labs at three universities - Lancaster University, Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art and connects it with public and private sectors, linking large and small-scale businesses, service providers and citizens. Together, our expertise in developing and applying creative techniques to navigate unexplored challenges includes that of designers, artists, curators, producers, broadcasters, engineers, managers, technologists and writers - and draws on wider expertise from across the partner universities and beyond. The Creative Exchange responds to profound changes in practice in the creative and media-based industries stimulated by the opening of the digital public space, the ability of everyone to access, explore and create in any aspect of the digital space, moving from 'content consumption' to 'content experience'. It explores new forms of engagement and exchange in the broadcast, performing and visual arts, digital media, design and gaming sectors, by focusing on citizen-led content, interactive narrative, radical personalization and new forms of value creation in the context of the 'experience economy'. The primary geographic focus is the Northwest of England centred around the opportunity presented by the growth of MediaCityUK and its surrounding economy. The three universities act as local test beds with field trials in London, Lancaster and Newcastle prior to larger public facing trials in the northwest. This will support the North West regional strategy for growth in digital and creative media industries, whilst generating comparative research and development locally, nationally and internationally. The Creative Exchange has been developed in response to a paradigm shift in content creation and modes of distribution in a digitally connected world, which has profound impact for the arts and humanities. This transformational-change is taking place within the landscape of a growing digital public space that includes archives, data, information and content. How we navigate and experience this space - and how we generate content for and within it - is central to how we create economic, social, cultural and personal value. The Hub draws on new and agile approaches to knowledge exchange for the creative economy that have been previously developed by the partner universities and new ones co-developed with specialist arts organizations, sector organizations and communities of users.

This project aims to help young people understand how climate change will shape the future of Morecambe Bay and the communities that inhabit it. By bringing together information on past and future coastal changes, and personal histories, this project will reflect on alternative futures and different ways to build community preparedness to environmental challenges. Current predictions show the significant impact that sea level rise and extreme weather events will have on coastal areas worldwide. However, what exactly will happen to individual coastal communities will vary greatly, and will largely depend on local geology, climate, infrastructures and community preparedness. Shoreline management plans presenting regional risk assessment and strategies are available, but the specialised formats and the language used in these documents make them effectively inaccessible to the public. In addition, these documents disregard the perspectives of coastal communities, and the tacit knowledge developed by people who have been affected by flooding and weather events in the past. Collecting localised knowledge and making it readable to the lay public is essential both to understand the impact of climate change in specific places and to inform local policies and public participation in decision making. In this project, students at Lancaster Our Lady's College, Morecambe Bay Academy, Carnforth High School, and Lancaster and Morecambe College will work with researchers in design, computing, and environmental science to create visualisations of place-specific coastal pasts and futures based on an innovative interdisciplinary methodology that brings together predictive models, citizen science, and ethnographic approaches. These visualisations will be presented as reels of stereographs accompanied by zines (also produced by the students) telling stories of coastal pasts and futures. They will reveal stories, questions, and images co-produced by researchers and young people, based on data collected in the first stage of the project. Each zine will feature a map indicating the coastal location of the stereoscope to use for bringing the visualisations to life. When looked at through the corresponding stereoscope, the images printed on the reel will appear as tri-dimensional visualisations. A sensor will also activate an audio track with sounds, stories, and critical questions for the audience. These audio-visual 'Timescapes' will be displayed during a Coastal Futures Festival as site-specific installations, which will enable members of the public to look at their surroundings through the lenses of costal change. This is an innovative approach, which enables students to design and produce the tools that are used to create immersive visualisations. The project appropriates the optical and mechanical tools of stereoscopy for a novel, creative purpose. No programming, proprietary software, or expensive equipment will be necessary, and young people will have full control over the whole process. As part of the Coastal Futures Festival, students will be engaged in a programme of talks and events in which they will share their visualisations with local councils, and environmental groups, including Environment Agency, North West Coastal Group & Forum, Heysham Heritage Centre, Lancashire Archives, and Lancaster City Council. The event will act as a catalyst for conversations on local futures and the role that public and professional bodies and members of the community can play in planning for response and adaptation to climate change, showing clear pathways for how young people can play an active role in these processes.

We want 1 million people to directly benefit from new adaptations of Leapfrog tools by unlocking the potential for practitioners across the UK and beyond to work at new scales. We will build on the success of the Leapfrog project by working with new public and third sector partners to help them engage with large groups. This will range from community meetings with hundreds of people through to some interactions that will have over 100,000 people using an adapted Leapfrog tool in a Design Week. To do this we will use co-design to collaboratively create and adapt Leapfrog tools with our partners, giving them tailored resources to support their work, and producing shareable tools available freely worldwide. Amongst the many challenges faced by the public sector at this time, there is a growing need to meaningfully involve more and more citizens, service users and communities in the difficult decisions that affect them. Scaling Up Leapfrog responds to this need by enabling our partners to directly take on the challenges that surround engaging hundreds of thousands of people in meaningful, creative dialogue. With our partners we will co-design Leapfrog tools to support engagement with 80-100 people at a time, a significant shift in scale from common engagement practice that generally engages ten or twenty people at a time. We will also collaborate with our partners to unlock new scales for parallel engagement, producing Leapfrog tools that help form connections between multiple events in a single initiative. Our partners range from those in public health (Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group), to national charity networks (Food Power), international design networks (World Design Weeks Network) and museums (Victoria and Albert Museum). These partners each seek to enable their staff to perform effective, creative engagement with an increasing number of participants. For some of our partners this is driven by a desire to make a population more health aware and to develop a social movement to that end, engaging with the most disadvantaged people and helping their voices have an effect in decision-making or to help eradicate food poverty by drawing on the expertise of people living in food poverty. We also have 'reach partners' who are working with very large numbers of people (e.g. Milan Design Week had over 400,000 attendees in 2018), we will work with the heads of 10 design weeks to develop new tools to help them engage with their audiences en-mass. We will use co-design to collaboratively design and test ways of enabling these new scales of engagement for our partners, giving them direct value during the project, and on-going value as new practices and resources becoming part of their organisational vocabulary. Our approach to the co-design of tools is exemplified in a stream of work from the current Leapfrog project (2015-2018) We co-designed with 20 librarians to help make this transition to mixed-service teams and spaces a more positive experience. Being led by them, together we developed a range of tools to help new teams form and function effectively. In Scaling up Leapfrog, one could imagine a tool being adapted from the Librarians 'New team tools' to help people explore the contents of a design week collaboratively; this could be incorporated into the tickets created for the design week. Its very important to note though, our experience is that the real insights come from actually co-designing with partners, the real outcomes of the co-design process are likely to be unexpected and all the more innovative for that. The new practices, tools and resources that are produced through co-design with our project partners will also have relevance across a diverse range of organisations, sectors and contexts. All the tools produced by the project will be shared freely through the Leapfrog website (www.leapfrog.tools), building on a library of free, resources available (and used) worldwide.

Despite the potential benefits of a location on the coast, many port and coastal towns and cities are run-down and unattractive, and underperform in economic and social wellbeing terms. This is often a result of a poor built environment, derelict industrial and other legacy sites, and a lack of meaningful connectivity between the urban realm, green spaces and the waterfront. Rising sea levels and coastal erosion pose further, existential, threats. These issues are common to port and coastal cities and towns all around the UK, hence transcend simplistic north/south or east/west categorisation or division. Addressing them through effective, sustainable and resilient regeneration is essential to the UK Government's Net Zero and Levelling Up agenda. Our Network+ will use concepts developed by UKCRIC on Flourishing Systems. We will take a systems-based, people-focussed view of infrastructure; keeping people at the centre of the vision, considering infrastructure as a way of connecting together interdependent systems, which must be designed to be sustainable, inclusive, secure and resilient. The complexity of the component systems, and the heterogeneity of drivers and foci, makes it difficult to optimise the infrastructure system of systems, even generally, towards a better future. We will adopt the Line of Sight approach, which involves actively facilitating different communities (people, experts, authorities, government, investors) to understand their current and potential priorities and roles; then to explore and develop synergies focused on new, common objectives along aligned lines of sight. The activities of the Network+ will be organised through five interdependent strands: 1. Celebrating the major asset: connecting the town/city with the waterfront, balancing the needs of a functional waterfront with ambience, public accessibility, leisure and heritage 2. Inclusive infrastructure: engaging with communities, policymakers, the public sector and business to ensure effective infrastructure development and use 3. Maintaining and enhancing resilience: making port and coastal city and town regeneration resilient to climate change, sea-level rise, coastal erosion and flooding 4. Coastal region transport: addressing issues associated with the particular challenges of transport to/from and within port and coastal cities and towns arising from linear development along the coast or estuary, a current or former working waterfront, and the absence of up to half the hinterland 5. Nature inspired, human scale engineering: including greening the grey infrastructure, to provide/enhance social value for the surrounding communities Extensive use will be made of testbed sites, with three having been selected as typifying a range of UK port and coastal city and town regeneration needs and issues. These are the port city of Southampton, Lancaster and Morecambe, and North Norfolk seaside towns including Cromer and Sheringham.