The primary academic design institutions in the Bristol and Bath region (UWE, and the universities of Bath Spa and Bristol) will collaborate in order to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the value and impact of design in the region. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, the team will strive to articulate the social and economic value of design, in addition to an assessment of the nature and quality of the regional design networks. Working in collaboration with REACT, West of England Design Forum (WEDF), Bristol Media, Creative Bath and The West of England Local Enterprise Partnership (WLEP), the three universities will provide a unique knowledge base that affords a deep understanding of the distinctive nature and characteristics of design in the Bristol and Bath region. The partner institutions' design academics will also exploit their networks with other regional HEIs including Bath University (Architecture & Engineering) and the University of Gloucestershire to provide consultative input into the project. A combination of approaches and methods drawn from both the social sciences and arts and humanities will enable the project team to move beyond the raw statistical sector mapping that has occurred to date through analysing the importance of the region's unique cultural heritage, the social, historical and cultural context within which designers operate. In this way, the project will create a robust framework for the understanding and evaluation of design in the region whose finding will benefit the research councils, the government, HEIs and industry.

The Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research and Applications (CAMERA) will build on and extend existing impactful relationships between leading researchers at the University of Bath supported by investment from the University, from external partners and with the close participation of Bath's EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre for Digital Entertainment (CDE). Building on existing expertise in Applied Visual Technology and closely linked with the CDE, CAMERA will draw on knowledge, skills and outputs across multi-disciplinary research areas. These include Computer Vision, Graphics, Motion-Capture, Human-Computer Interaction, Biomechanics and Healthcare, underpinned by a strong portfolio of DE research funding from RCUK and other funders. CAMERA will deliver Applied Visual Technology into our partners companies and their industries, to achieve high economic, societal and cultural impact. Bath leads the UK in innovative creative industry research and training for post-graduates through our CDE, which is contractually partnered with 35 innovative UK companies. Growing from our established core strength in the area of Visual Technology - capturing, modelling and visualising the real world - and our strong historical foundation of entertainment-delivered research, CAMERA will focus on high-impact work in movies, TV visual vffects (VFX) and video games with partners at the The Imaginarium and The Foundry, two of the world's leading visual entertainment companies. This focused collaboration will push the boundaries of technology in the area of human motion capture, understanding and animation, and artist driven visual effects production, feeding into our existing CDE partnerships. From this strong foundation, we will extend and apply visual technology to new areas of high economic, societal and cultural impact within the digital economy theme. These include Human Performance Enhancement, with partners in British Skeleton and BMT Defence Services; and Health, Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies, with partners in the Ministry of Defence. CAMERA is well placed to lead the application of Visual Technology in these new directions: Bath researchers have helped athletes to win 15 Olympic and World Championship medals in the last 10 years and have contributed significantly to national efforts in integrating ex-soldiers with disabilities into civilian life.

The world's manufacturing economy has been transformed by the phenomenon of globalisation, with benefits for economies of scale, operational flexibility, risk sharing and access to new markets. It has been at the cost of a loss of manufacturing and other jobs in western economies, loss of core capabilities and increased risks of disruption in the highly interconnected and interdependent global systems. The resource demands and environmental impacts of globalisation have also led to a loss of sustainability. New highly adaptable manufacturing processes and techniques capable of operating at small scales may allow a rebalancing of the manufacturing economy. They offer the possibility of a new understanding of where and how design, manufacture and services should be carried out to achieve the most appropriate mix of capability and employment possibilities in our economies but also to minimise environmental costs, to improve product specialisation to markets and to ensure resilience of provision under natural and socio-political disruption. This proposal brings together an interdisciplinary academic team to work with industry and local communities to explore the impact of this re-distribution of manufacturing (RDM) at the scale of the city and its hinterland, using Bristol as an example in its European Green Capital year, and concentrating on the issues of resilience and sustainability. The aim of this exploration will be to develop a vision, roadmap and research agenda for the implications of RDM for the city, and at the same time develop a methodology for networked collaboration between the many stakeholders that will allow deep understanding of the issues to be achieved and new approaches to their resolution explored. The network will study the issues from a number of disciplinary perspectives, bringing together experts in manufacturing, design, logistics, operations management, infrastructure, resilience, sustainability, engineering systems, geographical sciences, mathematical modelling and beyond. They will consider how RDM may contribute to the resilience and sustainability of a city in a number of ways: firstly, how can we characterise the economic, social and environmental challenges that we face in the city for which RDM may contribute to a solution? Secondly, what are the technical developments, for example in manufacturing equipment and digital technologies, that are enablers for RDM, and what are their implications for a range of manufacturing applications and for the design of products and systems? Thirdly, what are the social and political developments, for example in public policy, in regulation, in the rise of social enterprise or environmentalism that impact on RDM and what are their implications? Fourthly, what are the business implications, on supply networks and logistics arrangements, of the re-distribution? Finally, what are the implications for the physical and digital infrastructure of the city? In addition, the network will, through the way in which it carries out embedded focused studies, explore mechanisms by which interdisciplinary teams may come together to address societal grand challenges and develop research agendas for their solution. These will be based on working together using a combination of a Collaboratory - a centre without walls - and a Living Lab - a gathering of public-private partnerships in which businesses, researchers, authorities, and citizens work together for the creation of new services, business ideas, markets, and technologies.

REACT: Research & Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technologies. Knowledge Exchange gets lost in translation. Creative Economy demand and Arts and Humanities research culture too routinely fail to understand each other. They can seem to work to different rhythms and values. But they do and they must match, and they must talk, urgently. We will make that happen. REACT will engineer the radical change needed through its unique partnership with a leading Creative Economy broker, Watershed, pioneering a new model of dynamic creative interaction: Sandbox. REACT will match Creative Economy demand with Arts and Humanities excellence, creating sustainable partnerships that will provide significant economic and societal impacts, generating a transformative shift in capacity and HEI cultures at all levels. We will bring two cultures together and lead the necessary process of organisational change. Within four years we will have demonstrated the value of sustained tight integration of the CE sector and AH communities, and secured national and international recognition for our agile mechanism for dynamic knowledge exchange. The REACT Hub is a collaboration between the University of the West of England, Watershed Arts Trust, and the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter. It reaches across two dynamic UK regions, and uniquely across three cultural areas and two languages and creative economies. It brings together Arts & Humanities research from fields as diverse as Archaeology, Architecture, Classics, History, English, Welsh, Translation Studies, Performance, Media and Cultural Studies, Design, Music, Computer Science and Digital Technologies. REACT will offer researchers the chance to work with Micro businesses and SMEs, technology partners from either the commercial sector or the partner HEIs and larger scale Cultural Economy and Cultural Industry partners who have an interest in new creative content, and assets to exploit in partnership with academics. REACT will bring together high quality academic research with creative technology partners to developing innovative ways of engaging audiences. Creative economy partners will have the opportunity to develop new delivery platforms and researchers will be able to engage with audiences in new ways. REACT Universities have teamed up Bristol's Watershed Media Centre to adapt their ground breaking innovation development programme, Sandbox, for working with academic researchers. This programme is supported by the University of Exeter's Innovation Fitness Test offering participating Creative Economy partners the chance to strengthen their market potential. Watershed's Sandbox brings together production teams around themed cohorts to make practice based prototypes; production teams follow a common timetable of development and testing, sharing their learning with one another across the cohort. This proven method aggregates ideas, talent and resources harnessing powerful outputs from diverse cross disciplinary inputs. See http://www.theatresandbox.co.uk/2010-evaluation/ for an evaluation of the 20101 Theatre Sandbox scheme.