The cost and safety of the important elements of our life - energy, transport, manufacturing - depend on the engineering materials we use to fabricate components and structures. Engineers need to answer the question of how fit for purpose is a particular component or a system: a pressure vessel in a nuclear reactor; an airplane wing; a bridge; a gas turbine; at both the design stage and throughout their working life. The current cost of unexpected structural failures, 4% of GDP, illustrates that the answers given with the existing engineering methods are not always reliable. These methods are largely phenomenological, i.e. rely on laboratory length- and time-scale experiments to capture the overall material behaviour. Extrapolating such behaviour to real components in real service conditions carries uncertainties. The grand problem of current methods is that by treating materials as continua, i.e. of uniformly distributed mass, they cannot inherently describe the finite nature of the materials aging mechanisms leading to failure. If we learn how to overcome the constraint of the lab-based phenomenology, we will be able to make predictions for structural behaviour with higher confidence, reducing the cost of construction and maintenance of engineering assets and thus the cost of goods and services to all individuals and society. For example, by extending the life of one civil nuclear reactor the produced electricity each hour will cost £10k-15k less than from a new built nuclear reactor, or from a conventional power plant. This project is about the creation of a whole new technology for high-fidelity design and assessment of engineering structures. I will explore an original geometric theory of solids to overcome the phenomenological constraint, produce a pioneering software platform for structural analysis, validate the theory at several length scales, and demonstrate to the engineers how the new technology solves practical problems for which the present methods are inadequate. In contrast to the classical methods, the engineering materials will be seen as discrete collections of finite entities, or cells; importantly this is not a discretization of a continuum, such as those used in the current numerical methods, but a reflection of how materials organise at any length scale of observation - from atomic through to the polycrystalline aggregates forming engineering components. The cellular structure is characterised by distinct elements - cells, faces, edges and nodes - and the theory proposes an inventive way to describe how such a structure behaves by linking energy and entropy to the geometric properties of these elements - volumes, areas, lengths, positions. This theory will be implemented in a highly efficient software platform by adopting and modernising existing algorithms and developing new ones for massively parallel computations, which will enable engineers and scientists to exploit the impending acceleration in hardware power. With the expected leaps of computing power over the next five years (1018 operations per second by 2020) the new technology will allow for calculating the behaviour of engineering components and structures zooming in and out across length-scales from the atomic up to the structural. The verification and validation of the theory at multiple length-scales are now possible due to exceptionally powerful experimental techniques, such as lab- or synchrotron-based tomography, combined by image analysis techniques, such as digital volume correlation. Once verified, the technology will be applied to a series of engineering problems of direct industrial relevance, such as cleavage and ductile fracture and fatigue crack growth, providing convincing demonstrations to the engineering community. The product of the work will make a step change in the modelling and simulation of structures, suitable for the analysis of high value, high risk high reward engineering cases.

Servitization is the process of transforming manufacturers to compete through Product-Service Systems (PSS) rather than products alone. The commercial and environmental benefits of PSSs are compelling and well documented (Rolls-Royce earning over 50% of their revenue from services is cited to exhaustion). The opportunities are immense (three quarters of wealth world-wide is now created through performing services) and so politically PSSs are seen as key to industrial success in the 21st Century. Adoption of PSS is frustratingly slow in mainstream manufacturing. Superficially the concepts find appeal but fail to gain traction as the potential implications to a business are complex. In the meantime, China is catching up (Chinese manufacturing companies offering services have grown from 2 - 20% since 2006). In the UK, we need to get better at informing, educating and training, our senior manufacturing managers about PSS and servitization, giving them the means to visualize the potential impact upon their business. Gamification offers a radical solution. Gamification bridges video-gaming technologies and computer simulations to offer three-dimensional virtual worlds, dynamic and content-rich, which can be used to entertain, educate and inform. This is especially innovative for user engagement, supporting behavior and attitudinal change, and the design of advanced human and computer interfaces for representing and handling complex data systems. This programme will therefore develop applied game technologies, design principles and protocols, to transform the adoption of PSSs within mainstream manufacturing companies and so accelerate the foothold of gamifiaction in strategic business analysis.

London is a complex environment for Knowledge Exchange and cultural and creative interactions. It faces distinctive challenges as it attempts to sustain global competiveness in the Creative Economy, particularly in terms of digital innovation. Creativeworks London builds on the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange (LCACE), a seven year partnership of nine London-based Higher Education Institutions: Birkbeck College, City University, the Courtauld Institute, Goldsmiths College, Guildhall, King's College London, Queen Mary University of London, Royal Holloway and University of the Arts. We will be joined by smaller specialist organisations such as the University of London's Centre for Creative Collaboration, Central School of Speech and Drama, Roehampton, SOAS, Kingston and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and by major cultural organisations such as the BBC, the British Museum,the V&A and the British Library. We will be liaising with the London Mayor's office and the Tech City Investment Company (part of UK Trade and Investment), and UK-wide groups such as the Creative and Cultural Skills Council. We will also be working closely with industry partners, both large and small, including IBM, Playgen/ Digital Shoreditch, Mediaclarity and Bellemedia. This enables the Hub to provide a step-change in the multiple and often fragmented approaches to London's Creative Economy and to provide crucial Arts and Humanities interventions into the sector. Crucially, the Hub will also ensure that the importance of these interventions are widely recognised by business, policy-makers and government. To do so, it will undertake research into London's previous and current attempts to implement creative economy strategies; investigate the special requirements of London's digital economy and the relationship that London's audiences have between the live and the digital experience of performances and artefacts. The Hub's Knowledge Exchange programme focuses on 'Creative Vouchers' where Arts & Humanities researchers will offer a range of services (such as historical information that the Media would like to access, policy overviews, IP advice, digital solutions, alternative approaches to business models or practices) which can be accessed by SMEs. The scheme will also allow us to track the sector's changing needs, feeding back into our research into London's distinctive creative economy. There will also be a 'People Exchange Scheme' for both postgraduate researchers who want to experience industry and entrepreneurs who would benefit from a period of time within an HEI environment. The combination of excellent research and innovative KE will ensure that Creativeworks London provides a strategic overview and network support. This will be essential if London, and hence the UK, is to cultivate entrepreneurial capacity and facilitate new routes to markets in inter-related fields such as digital media, music, fashion and the visual arts.

The creative industries are crucial to UK social and cultural life and one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the economy. Games and media are key pillars for growth in the creative industries, with UK turnovers of £3.5bn and £12.9bn respectively. Research in digital creativity has started to be well supported by governmental funds. To achieve full impact from these investments, translational and audience-facing research activities are needed to turn ideas into commercial practice and societal good. We propose a "Digital Creativity" Hub for such next-step research, which will produce impact from a huge amount of research activity in direct collaboration with a large group of highly engaged stakeholders, delivering impact in the Digital Economy challenge areas of Sustainable Society, Communities and Culture and New Economic Models. York is the perfect location for the DC Hub, with a fast-growing Digital Creativity industry (which grew 18.4% from 2011 to 2012), and 4800 creative digital companies within a 40-mile radius of the city. The DC Hub will be housed in the Ron Cooke Hub, alongside the IGGI centre for doctoral training, world-class researchers, and numerous small hi-tech companies. The DC Hub brings: - A wealth of research outcomes from Digital Economy projects funded by £90m of grants, £40m of which was managed directly by the investigators named in the proposal. The majority of these projects are interdisciplinary collaborations which involved co-creation of research questions and approaches with creative industry partners, and all of them produced results which are ripe for translational impact. - Substantial cash and in-kind support amounting to pledges of £9m from 80 partner organisations. These include key organisations in the Digital Economy, such as the KTN, Creative England and the BBC, major companies such as BT, Sony and IBM, and a large number of SMEs working in games and interactive media. The host Universities have also pledged £3.3m in matched funding, with the University of York agreeing to hire four "transitional" research fellows on permanent contracts from the outset leading to academic positions as a Professor, a Reader and two Lecturers. - Strong overlap with current projects run by the investigators which have complementary goals. These include the NEMOG project to study new economic models and opportunities for games, the Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI) centre for doctoral training, with 55+ PhDs, and the Falmouth ERA Chair project, which will contribute an extra 5 five-year research fellowships to the DC Hub, leveraging £2m of EC funding for translational research in digital games technologies. - A diverse and highly active base of 16 investigators and 4 named PDRAs across four universities, who have much experience of working together on funded research projects delivering high-impact results. The links between these investigators are many and varied, and interdisciplinarity is ensured by a group of investigators working across Computer Science, Theatre Film and TV, Electronics, Art, Audio Production, Sociology, Education, Psychology, and Business. - Huge potential for step-change impact in the creative industries, with particular emphasis on video game technologies, interactive media, and the convergence of games and media for science and society. Projects in these areas will be supported by and feed into basic research in underpinning themes of data analytics, business models, human-computer interaction and social science. The projects will range over impact themes comprising impact projects which will be specified throughout the life of the Hub in close collaboration with our industry partners, who will help shape the research, thus increasing the potential for major impact. - A management team, with substantial experience of working together on large projects for research and impact in collaboration with the digital creative industries.