As the web becomes pervasive and deeply entrenched as part of our daily routines, more people than ever have the basic tools to express themselves through creative activities including: producing and editing video clips, composing music, and creating design artefacts and artworks. Yet sceptics including professionals often criticise this newly found freedom for destroying established business models, and for contributing to a cultural divide by fracturing our common culture into cultural bolt-holes . This proposal seeks to bring the creative public (including user groups and communities) to work alongside the producers (including the professional designers), by mindfully harvesting the public contributions as cultural resources to transform traditional in-house design and reduce R&D wastage; and to induce creativity, and social innovation. We will collaborate with Marks and Spencer to build and test a platform that facilitates contribution to the cultural production of design, exploitation of existing digital tools, and development of new tools. The platform will make available an array of digital tools to encourage interactivity and to further contribute to a register of cultural resources in terms of: a wiki of design artefacts (product forms, functions, etc.); and repertories of 'data' on how users perceive, appropriate and incorporate products into their lives, how well products fulfil their needs, how they imbue meaning and explore their individual, social and cultural identities through them, and how communities are formed through consumption and use. The cultural register provides a repository of cultural resources, which encourage reuse across and within different socio-cultural and business contexts. Our project fits RiTW well in that it enables us to engage directly with user groups and a consumer products brand to test the potential transformational impact of 'user innovation' as cultural production with consumer communities, which could feed into other areas of 'open design'.The ultimate aim of our research is to create a cultural register of design objects that facilitates sharing and reuse by the producers and the creative public through better use and exploitation of digital tools.The project team brings together reseachers with a background in design, user and open innovation, and ubiquitous computing. We will adopt a user driven approach to the design and development of a series of tools that bridging the socio-cultural gaps between user and business communities. The project team will leverage our strong connections with key industrial, public sector and academic groups in UK and internationally, ensuring that the proposed research will have maximum impact to communities of practice and creative and cultural industries.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Smart devices are becoming more and more popular in UK households. The fact that they can interact with individuals in their homes, for example by showing a video on a smart TV, displaying an image on a smart assistant, or playing a sound on the smart speaker, makes them the most likely next frontier for organisations to communicate to the public. These messages could potentially be tailored to the audience's demographics or preferences, which is made even more possible with the data collected from users via a widening range of smart devices. Public authorities and civil society organisations are among those who will show potential interest in leveraging these new communicative channels to deliver messages that are of public importance, ranging from public health matters to climate change issues. While some members of the public will have an interest in receiving these messages via smart devices (or even actively subscribing to some of those organisations), there will be likely concerns around the use of these new technologies, such as privacy, security and agency. At the moment, while there has been emerging research suggesting public concerns about related technologies (for example, online targeting), it is not clear how these concerns may play out in the smart home environment, or under what conditions such practices can be acceptable. Evidence is currently lacking to inform policymaking or production of specific guidelines. Focusing on public communications allows us to explore the potential public interests in personalised smart messaging (unlike commercial advertising, where mostly private interests are involved) while avoiding what has been proved highly sensitive and controversial (such as political microtargeting). The Internet of Tactical Engagement (IoTE) project will therefore investigate the attitudes of the public towards public authorities and civil society organisations using smart home products to message users. The project will involve stakeholders, including public authorities, civil society organisations and policymakers, to capture their understandings of the current landscape and the prospect of smart engagement. A series of situational scenarios will then be created as a means to engage with the public and to gain insights into their perceptions of these new developments. This will provide the necessary evidence for organisations to consider how to utilise the new technological possibilities in ways acceptable and trustworthy to smart product users, and for policymakers to decide whether further safeguards will be needed in anticipation of this new reality.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The UK, along with most other nations in Europe, is encountering a paradigm shift as the funding, management, and protection of infrastructure is increasingly expected to be managed through partnership-led governance ensuring better informed and more viable, long-term decision making. This shift in emphasis from 'top-down' direct government, to 'bottom-up' stakeholder engagement is particularly pronounced in managing risks to critical infrastructure and the environment. Current methodologies and tools, such as surveys and stakeholder focus groups, aimed at consultation with stakeholder organisations and citizens are however generally limited in scope and insufficiently open or adaptive. Thus, they do not effectively inform the complex planning processes underlying comprehensive, multi-faceted infrastructure development planning as undertaken for example in the Thames Estuary. In order to inform and reconcile planning approaches to heterogeneous challenges such as environmental risk protection, economic viability (e.g., fisheries) and ecosystem management, new consultation methods and novel ways of combining multi-stakeholder views with quantitative data are urgently needed. The Thames Estuary Partnership (TEP) and its partners are facing the challenge of stakeholder integration in the planning of imminent, major infrastructural development in the context of large scale projects in the areas of pollution (sewers), flood protection and ecosystem management. This project is designed to leverage, apply and evaluate - in the Thames Estuary Infrastructure context, cutting edge methodologies and software tools for value-based, data-driven planning methods developed and tested as part of the recent, interdisciplinary EPSRC funded project "Towards Data-Driven Environmental Policy Design" (TDDEPD). Building on novel developments in human data capture and computer science, these techniques enable the rapid and comprehensive capture of qualitative data; e.g., stakeholder opinion and their integration with quantitative data sources such as sensor measurements (e.g., rainfall levels) and process outputs. While these planning methodologies were developed in a very different topical (i.e. environmental protection planning) and geographic (Western Australian wetlands) context, this project will explore their adaptation and application to the context of infrastructural planning in the Thames Estuary. In order to establish their viability, the project brings together an exceptional team, led by the TEP and including the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute and School of Computer Science from the University of Nottingham (Horizon) and integrating key expertise in planning contributed (as an in-kind contribution) by the Department for Parks and Wildlife by the Western Australian Government. The ambitious project will deliver a novel value-driven methodology for infrastructure planning, including an adapted framework for stakeholder engagement. A digital platform enabling the capture and processing of both stakeholder input and (often uncertain) quantitative data (e.g., water levels) will be developed and will provide essential management support tools such as sensitivity analyses for potential infrastructure changes. The latter will also directly support the evaluation of the proposed approach and will enable addressing a concrete use case within the project time frame (Clean Seas Please). TEP believe that a values-based approach to managing infrastructure, risk, and habitat creation will be the only effective way forward. They believe that using the methods to be developed in this work by a team with a strong track record and significant expertise will transform the way they interact with those to whom they are responsible at the levels of policy setting, and policy implementation and will enable the comprehensive planning and development of infrastructure in the future.