We will train a cohort of 65 PhD students to tackle the challenge of Data Creativity for the 21st century digital economy. In partnership with over 40 industry and academic partners, our students will establish the technologies and methods to enable producers and consumers to co-create smarter products in smarter ways and so establish trust in the use of personal data. Data is widely recognised by industry as being the 'fuel' that powers the economy. However, the highly personal nature of much data has raised concerns about privacy and ownership that threaten to undermine consumers' trust. Unlocking the economic potential of personal data while tackling societal concerns demands a new approach that balances the ability to innovate new products with building trust and ensuring compliance with a complex regulatory framework. This requires PhD students with a deep appreciation of the capabilities of emerging technology, the ability to innovate new products, but also an understanding of how this can be done in a responsible way. Our approach to this challenge is one of Data Creativity - enabling people to take control of their data and exercise greater agency by becoming creative consumers who actively co-create more trusted products. Driven by the needs of industry, public sector and third sector partners who have so far committed £1.6M of direct and £2.8M of in kind funding, we will explore multiple sectors including Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Food; Creative Industries; Health and Wellbeing; Personal Finance; and Smart Mobility and how it can unlock synergies between these. Our partners also represent interests in enabling technologies and the cross cutting concerns of privacy and security. Each student will work with industry, public, third sector or international partners to ensure that their research is grounded in real user needs, maximising its impact while also enhancing their future employability. External partners will be involved in PhD co-design, supervision, training, providing resources, hosting placements, setting industry-led challenge projects and steering. Addressing the challenges of Data Creativity demands a multi-disciplinary approach that combines expertise in technology development and human-centred methods with domain expertise across key sectors of the economy. Our students will be situated within Horizon, a leading centre for Digital Economy research and a vibrant environment that draws together a national research Hub, CDT and a network of over 100 industry, academic and international partners. We currently provide access to a network of >80 potential supervisors, ranging from leading Professors to talented early career researchers. This extends to academic partners at other Universities who will be involved in co-hosting and supervising our students, including the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. We run an integrated four-year training programme that features: a bespoke core covering key topics in Future Products, Enabling Technologies, Innovation and Responsibility; optional advanced specialist modules; internship and international exchanges; industry-led challenge projects; training in research methods and professional skills; modules dedicated to the PhD proposal, planning and write up; and many opportunities for cross-cohort collaboration including our annual industry conference, retreat and summer schools. Our Impact Fund supports students in deepening the impact of their research. Horizon has EDI considerations embedded throughout, from consideration of equal opportunities in recruitment to ensuring that we deliver an inclusive environment which supports diversity of needs and backgrounds in the student experience.

The Horizon institute is a multidisciplinary centre of excellence for Digital Economy (DE) research. The core mission of Horizon has been to balance the opportunities arising from the capture, analysis and use of personal data with an awareness and understanding of human and social values. The focus on personal data in a wide range of contexts has required the development of a broad set of multidisciplinary competencies allowing us to build links from foundational algorithms and system to issues of society and policy. We follow a user-centred approach, undertaking research in the wild based on principles of open innovation. Horizon now encompasses over 50 researchers, spanning Computing, Engineering, Law, Psychology, Social Sciences, Business and the Humanities. It has grown a diverse network of over 200 external partners who are involved in ongoing collaborative research and impact with Horizon, ranging from major international corporations to SMEs, from a wide variety of sectors, alongside government and civil society groups. We have also established a CDT in the third wave of funding that will eventually deliver 150 PhDs. Our critical mass of researchers, partners, students and funding has already led to over 800 peer-reviewed publications, composed of: 277 journal articles, 51 books and book chapters, and 424 conference papers, in a total of 15 different disciplines. Over the years Horizon's focus has evolved from an emphasis on the collection and understanding of personal data to consider the user-centred design and development of data-driven products. This proposal builds on our established interdisciplinary competencies to deliver research and impact to ensure that future data-driven products can be both co-created and trusted by consumers. Core to our current vision is the idea that future products will be hybrids of both the digital and the physical. Physical products are increasingly augmented with digital capabilities, from data footprints that capture their provenance to software that enables them to adapt their behaviour. Conversely, digital products are ultimately physically experienced by people in some real-world context and increasingly adapt to both. This real-world context is social; hence the data is social and often implicates groups, not just individuals. We foresee that this blending of physical and digital will drive the merging of traditional goods, services and experiences into new forms of product. We also foresee that - just as today's social media services are co-created by consumers who provide content and data - so will be these new data-driven products. At the same time, we are also witnessing a crisis of trust concerning the commercial use of personal data that threatens to undermine this vision of data-driven products. Hence, it is vitally important to build trust with consumers and operate within an increasingly complex regulatory environment from the earliest stages of innovating future products. Our user-centred approach involves external partners and the public in "research-in-the-wild", grounding our fundamental research in real world challenges. Our delivery programme combines a bottom-up approach in which researchers are given the opportunity (and provided with the skills) to follow new impact opportunities in collaboration with partners as they arise (our Agile programme), with a top-down approach that strategically coordinates how these activities are targeted at wider communities (our Campaigns programme, with successive focus on Consumables, Co-production and Welfare), and reflective processes that allow us to draw out broader conclusions for the widest possible impact (our Cross-Cutting programme). Throughout we aim to continue to develop the capacity in our researchers, the wider DE research community and more broadly within society, to engage in responsible innovation using personal data within the Digital Economy.

Although people are living longer than ever before, the number of people with dementia is increasing, and 1 in 5 people over 80 will have dementia by 2021. People with dementia and their families often become disconnected from society through the stigmatizing effect dementia has on taking part in everyday activities. Added to this, the current economic climate has meant reductions in many services, and there is often a lack of meaningful activity available to this population. Yet many people with dementia wish to remain within their communities, in the home of their choice, near their family, carers and friends, with the support of health and social care services. This research aims to address the disconnection and marginalisation of people with dementia and explore how the vision for dementia supportive communities might benefit from creative activities. Specifically, it will use a visual art intervention as the catalyst for change for understanding community connectivity, challenging attitudes and promoting well being. Research to date, although limited, suggests a number of potential benefits of arts participation to the quality of life, health and well-being of people with dementia. This project wishes to build on this to address a new area, which will maximise the involvement of, and potential benefit to communities. It will look at how participation in community arts interventions can increase well-being and connectedness between the dementia community and wider society. It will also examine another new area, to further understand the underlying processes that create the connection between arts participation and good outcomes. To realise the aims, the research will be set within three areas of the UK. These consist of ethnically and geographically diverse communities to contextualise the research. In each area our project partners will deliver the same visual arts intervention over a 12 month period to different groups. To understand the impact, the research will assess changes over time in the well-being and social connectedness of people with dementia, and how these changes can in turn have positive effects in communities (facilitate change in societal attitudes and promote participation and inclusion) through social contagion. The processes and outcomes of the research will be assessed using a range of quantitative and qualitative approaches, and will use art, both as a tool for analysis and for visual, creative representations of the results. The research builds on existing relationships and develops new ones with community and policy partners, such as arts organisations, museums, galleries, health and social care practitioners, charities and local government. This will ensure full engagement and maximum benefit and impact for research, policy and practice. It will also contribute towards building future sustainability.

The VisitorBox project will produce a toolkit that combines physical ideation cards with a mobile app and web-based idea repository to enable heritage organisations to rapidly generate and share ideas for new visitor experiences. This Follow-on Fund project addresses the 'Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities' theme and will forge impact through commercialization and knowledge exchange. It builds on research undertaken by the project team as well as research and impact collaborations with our external partners. These partners are chosen from different segments of the regional and national heritage economy; they represent curators and collection managers with differing training backgrounds, all keen to harness digital technologies to enhance access to and engagement with their collection assets. VisitorBox presents an unanticipated pathway to impact that has emerged from the AHRC international network Data - Asset - Method (DAM network: AH/J006963/1). This network identified the barriers that prevent our stakeholders operating in the culture economy from accessing digital technologies. The main barrier is the stakeholders' lack of an overview of available technologies, and their low confidence and expertise to experiment with such technologies, especially at the early stages of design and prototyping. The network findings align in particular with our experience of collaborating with partners in the heritage sector, including in the context of three EU-funded projects. We want to bring to bear our knowledge and the expertise gained through the network to overcome the barriers of harnessing digital technologies in this specific sector. Our aim is to respond to one explicit demand of our heritage partners in the domain of visitor engagement, which is their key means of intellectual and commercial exploitation: to have access to their own design and prototyping exploration tools and so scale up the impact of our research and consultancy. Researchers and partners (including the Nottingham Castle and Galleries, the National Videogame Arcade, the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum, Nottingham's UNESCO City of Literature, and the National Trust) will work together as co-producers of VisitorBox. The tool-set will consist of a set of ideation cards. These physical playing cards represent individual design concepts, technologies, user types, and visiting activities; the cards encapsulate comprehensive engagement design and humanities thinking, reflected in the rules for playing them. The cards will allow players (e.g. curators) to produce new ideas quickly but without compromising on methodological depth. Alongside the card deck VisitorBox will include a mobile app, allowing players to scan individual cards or card combinations to capture ideas and curatorial trajectories in digital form. Players will be able to upload these digital ideas to an interactive website, the VisitorBox repository, and share them with their colleagues, or with trusted partners. Users will also be able to gain access to a rich set of digital resources that will support project refinement and execution. The project will evidence the value of the toolkit through co-production with our partners in six design workshops and additional piloting with twenty national and international heritage organisations. Feedback from these activities will inform the development of a sustainable business model for VisitorBox. We will promote VisitorBox along with our business plan at high-profile sectoral events in Europe and the US, and within the teaching programme of a leading US HE organisation. The project will be led by an early-career researcher - Dr Ben Bedwell - to establish him as a research leader at the interface of Computer Science and the Humanities. The project team has a strong track record of developing challenge-driven technologies for arts and humanities practitioners; it involves the lead investigators of the DAM network, Lorenz and Benford.

The arts and humanities have a strong tradition of building, maintaining and using archives as part of their research. The creative industries also exploit archives, but refer to them as databases of assets from which they generate experiences for public audiences. In turn, social media now enable these audiences to contribute back to archives by commenting, tagging, annotating and uploading their own media. Our proposal addresses the potential for a productive collision of archives, assets and audiences to the benefit of all concerned by bringing together academics with the creative industries, and engaging both with diverse audiences. In order to drive this vision forward, we will focus on industrial heritage as a target sector of the creative industries, specifically on the three themes of i) enlightenment and innovation; ii) cultures of work, welfare and play; and iii) the rise, fall and re-invention of industry. This focus builds on the rich heritage of our region; the expertise of our three university partners, Nottingham, Leicester, and Nottingham Trent; and the interests and resources of a wide network of industry and cultural partners. Our objectives are to engage external partners, grow our capacity for knowledge exchange, deliver a portfolio of demonstrator projects, and ensure the future sustainability of our approach. We will achieve this through a year-long programme of engagement activities (theme launch days and a final symposium); mobility and training activities (knowledge exchange fellowships and student internships); feasibility projects; and sustainability activities (ingenuity and reflection workshops). As part of our programme we will work with the REACT Hub in particular to complement their Heritage Sandbox currently underway but which will have concluded by the start of our programme. The Director of REACT, Prof. John Dovey, will sit on the steering group to aid complementarity and shared learning.