Individuals experience significantly more stress from the fear of crime than from any direct experience of it. Sources such as Health Canada maintain that the physical environment (e.g. unused and empty spaces, poorly lit areas, areas obscured with trees and shrubs) contributes to these experiences. As an example, on university campuses, opportunities for attackers to hide can increase student fears. It is extremely challenging, however, to design public spaces that fully alleviate the public's concerns over their safety. This is due to a number of reasons: (i) even the best design processes cannot fully anticipate a user group's needs; (ii) usage patterns by the public are not fully known until the public space has been in use for some time; (iii) usage patterns naturally change over time as the role of the space in the community evolves. As a consequence, despite notable attempts at considering safety in the design of public environments - e.g., Vivacity 2020 - a priori design will never be able to fully satisfy the public's needs.This proposal argues that users of a public space know the space best. It further contends that, at present, only a small proportion of users' views are taken into account during design. Design processes typically include public consultations before construction and post-occupancy evaluation surveys. However, relatively speaking, very few users provide input into these processes. On the other hand, all users have opinions about the spaces in which they live and work. As an example, a worker may mentally note that a pedestrian crossing is required at a busy intersection, but the pressures of modern life mean that s/he is unlikely ever to feed back this comment to the local council. This kind of knowledge - which people possess but may not realize its importance to others - is termed tacit knowledge. The VoiceYourView project aims to mobilise the tacit knowledge of a community to transform public spaces to be safer and more inclusive. The VoiceYourView concept is best illustrated by example. Imagine a park in central England. Mary is 72 years old and walks her dog every day. On her route, at dusk, she hesitates as she walks past a large shrub, fearing what is behind. Judy is 26. Her jogging route takes her into areas of the park that are poorly lit and she is afraid. Paul is 43 and takes his children to the park but is concerned that the bandstand is becoming a magnet for teenage drinking parties. Today, Mary, Judy and Paul each have limited ways of communicating their tacit knowledge to the appropriate people. They would need to compose a letter - which is unlikely given the time stresses on their daily lives. The goal of VoiceYourView is to provide Mary, Judy and Paul with a way to record their feedback in real-time at the moment it occurs to them in the park rather than having to wait until it is forgotten about. In this way, VoiceYourView will collect real-time information that can then be structured, stored in an online repository, and exchanged with appropriate stakeholders: other users, local community groups, local authorities, etc. The hypothesis is that, by so doing, VoiceYourView will lead to public space designs that are more attuned to the needs of their users and, in particular, do a better job at alleviating their safety concerns.We will design inclusive input devices for the collection of tacit knowledge in public spaces and will implement a repository that will use techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) to filter, structure and classify this knowledge. We will conduct a series of trials in key public areas - including Derry city walls and Coventry underpass - to drive and evaluate VoiceYourView research. We will undertake basic research to understand how VoiceYourView requirements are impacted by existing crime trends and how VoiceYourView fits into and influences existing design processes. VoiceYourView is a partnership between five universities and associated partners and will take place over a three year period.

We define citizen-led (social) innovation as the bottom-up creation of community-driven solutions to major societal problems. Citizen-led innovation has been an active ingredient of societies for centuries. However, technological developments such as online social networks and mobile computing have made it easier than ever before to initiate and nurture it; these technologies permit 'ridiculously easy group forming' and have led to civic engagement on a scale and with an efficiency not seen before.Recent events mean that now is both an opportune and critically necessary time for citizen-led innovation. On the one hand, society has experienced a massive global economic crisis. We are all being asked to do more for less and one consequence is that citizens are now expected to become more active participants in solving local problems (cf. Big Society). On the other hand, governments in both the UK and US are opening up public data in a drive for transparency that puts information into the hands of citizens in a way never before envisaged. This proposal addresses two core themes that will maximize the opportunities for citizens to transform society: understanding behaviour (what stimulates people to participate and why) and tools for change (what next-generation technologies best support how people want to innovate). Regarding the first theme, much of what is being proposed by governments - Localism, National Citizen Service, Big Society - is being implemented without a sociological understanding of what people need from it. Regarding the second, although social technologies have been extremely effective in promoting citizen-led activism, they were not designed specifically for it; it is natural, therefore, to ask what the next generation of tools should look like and to design those tools with the wants and needs of participatory citizens firmly in mind.Furthermore, there are fundamental barriers to overcome. In particular, there is a well-known tension between innovation and inclusion. Experience from organisations such as Community Matters shows that a major reason for citizens engaging in social action is the need for more human contact; however, technology has a tendency to reduce human contact in favour of virtual contact. We therefore see that a fundamental challenge is to reverse this trend. In all our research activities, we will emphasise this goal and work towards technologies that are mediators and not replacements for human contact. Our research methodology puts people-based activities at the forefront of an integrated research/people strategy that aims to answer fundamental research questions about citizen-led innovation via a series of 'research sprints' that will combine discipline hopping, cross-discipline training, a community-driven research agenda and reflection on the interdisciplinary process itself.The project will bring together a group of social scientists (sociology; anthropology), computer scientists (mobile computing; web2.0; distributed systems), management scientists (consumer behaviour) and designers (innovation) to develop next generation systems that empower citizens to create bottom-up innovative solutions to 'wicked' societal problems. We will work with partners in Manchester and Derry with which we have a history of success: the Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA) and FutureEverything in Manchester; Derry District Policing Partnership (DDPP) in Derry. We will also focus on widening the research to communities across the UK. This will be facilitated by two organisations - the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and Community Matters