The vast majority of cultural organisations face significant barriers in transitioning towards networked, online cultural and business models. We call this the 'New Real.' New literacies and skills are needed to develop and delight online audiences while negotiating the profound, complex challenges surrounding safety, privacy, transparency, and misinformation in networked environments. Being able to critically reason about the function of a system makes us more resilient in the face of future system failures, or can help us to make judgements about whether systems are safe and ethical. Our project responds directly to this need. Qualitative research through participatory design and ethnographic methodology will investigate the potential for strategies from data arts to be tailored and situated for organisations newly producing online experiences. It will specifically address the design of online and hybrid experiences to both delight audiences and develop critical literacies around the underlying tensions and moral dilemmas in the New Real. Aim: to better understand how to facilitate and accelerate the transition to resilience through new cultural, social and economic models for the UK's world leading cultural sector. This is supported by three concrete Objectives (O), each corresponding to a work-package (WP) and research question (RQ): O1: Understand the strategies used by data arts practitioners and organisations to delight audiences and build critical literacies in the New Real. O2: Co-design pathways with cultural organisations towards new forms of pandemic-resilient online and hybrid experiences. O3: Synthesise a set of actionable insights, tools, concepts and models that can enable and support post-COVID19 recovery.

Our project aims to provide an engaging, awe-inspiring interaction with science for a large, general public audience. Through an exhibition of large-scale, high-impact images in the city centre of Edinburgh, it will showcase the ways in which advances in science and technology can – through cutting-edge imagery techniques – reveal some of the wonderful sights normally hidden to us. Free, open and accessible, the exhibition will provide a valuable platform for reaching new audiences. It will form a valuable part of our continued attempts to make science and technology easily accessible to those not necessarily engaged with, or targeted by, most traditional science communication activity. It will showcase some of the vastness, complexity and beauty of science in fields such as biomedical imaging and astronomy. In doing so it will draw attention to the techniques, technologies and research that make it possible to glimpse these otherwise invisible worlds.

The aim of this project is to enable the public release and long-term support of software prototypes developed during the NETEM research project, thereby vastly increasing the impact and dissemination of the research. The NETEM ('Networking Technology and the Experience of Ensemble Music-making') project asked whether a wireless network of tablet computers could be transformative to the experience of musical ensemble playing. To explore this question, we developed two apps for Apple's iPad: NETEM Conductor and NETEM Performer. These apps display musical scores in the place of conventional paper scores, and synchronise the performers' scores with the conductors score. With synchronised scores, musicians cannot lose their place in the music. This reduces stress and increases confidence, enabling the whole ensemble to focus on musicality. It also enables access to ensemble music for less experienced musicians, and supports ensembles with performers of varied abilities. The NETEM project followed a participatory ethos, and the apps were developed with regular testing and feedback from a primary school orchestra and with a varied set of local musical ensembles, musicians and conductors. Feedback from these groups has demonstrated that the NETEM apps would be valuable to many musical ensembles. The apps in their current form are research prototypes, designed for the NETEM research project, and to be used with the support of the research team. They lack some user interface features and basic functions that everyday users would normally expect from a public release. Users without specific technical expertise may find them difficult to use. This project will develop the apps from research prototypes into consumer quality releases, following a clearly defined specification of new features that need to be implemented. We will also build an online community hub to support users. We will make the apps available to a wide user-base by creating a new version for Android in addition to iOS. Building on the rich participatory ethos established with the initial project, we have organised frequent testing sessions with a student ensemble and with our partner ensembles: Lewes Concert Orchestra, Dorothy Stringer Secondary School Orchestra and Community Music for All Sussex. A core concern of this project is to ensure longevity of the outputs, beyond the lifetime of this and future research grants. To achieve this, we are collaborating with Sussex Innovation Centre (SInC), a business support hub at the University of Sussex. SInC are conducting market research within the UK education sector and with community orchestras, and are identifying structures and organisations that will help us engage with stakeholders in these sectors. They will work with us to create a plan for setting up a company to support the apps and the community of app users. The company will operate with sustainability and affordability as its priorities. Revenue will pay for future updates and repairs to the software, and for long-term support for the community of users. Our collaboration with SInC is supported by a £5,000 grant from the University of Sussex Enterprise Panel, and will lay the foundations for an ongoing partnership through the company we form. The apps will be released in spring 2017, with a public launch event in London. At the event, members of the public of any musical skill level will be able to take part in an ensemble rehearsal and performance with professional musicians, supported and enabled by the software. A similar event will follow at Edinburgh Science Festival.

Cyberneering 2008, an exhibit and activity space at the Edinburgh International Science Festival's Wonderama venue where science and engineering students will engage both children and adults in a variety of activities based on Heriot-Watt University's EPSRC funded projects including SMI (Scottish Manufacturing Institutes) research projects. Here families will see how state-of-the art technologies can be used as creative and analytical tools in the engineering design process. The activities and exhibits will cover a number of engineering disciplines listed here:1 Manufacturing Engineering / Haptic Design , an activity developed for EPSRC PPE Grant EP/D067596/1 Making the Future ;2 Engineering Design / Design-a-Zook , based on work in the EPSRC IMRC Grand Challenge Grant EP/C534220/1 Immortal Information and Through Life Knowledge Management using CBBC's BAMZOOKi software;3 Mechanical Engineering / ROLAND an interactive robot display developed for EPSRC PPA GR/S80653/01 / Robot / Fact, fiction and future. 4 Electronic Engineering / Talking Robot Head , an exhibit developed for EPSRC PPE Grant EP/E033172/1 Engineering : A brighter, younger future ;5 Optical Engineering / Sensing with Light , a new hands on exhibit that will introduce the use of optical techniques for engineering applications.6 Chemical Engineering / Mixing it Up , a new chemical engineering exhibit that makes the link between visual computer simulations of mixing processes and the physical process as demonstrated by a small scale oscillatory baffled reactor.We feel that activities and exhibits at family orientated Science Festivals and Science Centres can play an important roll in educating and influencing young people's career choices. By showing both children and their accompanying adults that engineering is creative, enjoyable and of the digital age , children's positive views of engineering may be supported and encouraged by their family. In addition it is important to inform the public of the diverse skills required for engineering and in particular emphasise that they may already have some of those skills such as imagination, creativity, team working, problem solving and computing and may want to develop others: maths and sciences. Cyberneering 2008 builds on the proposers' experience from staging Cyberneering with Heriot-Watt at the 2007 Edinburgh International Science Festival (EISF) which show cased three activities/events, Haptic Design , Design-a-Zook and ROLAND . The prospers feel that it was the combination of activities that led to the overall success of the 2007 Cyberneering exhibit and feel that there is value in repeating this on a slightly larger scale in 2008. Lessons learned indicate that more interactive drop-in exhibits would appeal to, and reach a wider audience, while the hands-on activities with high engineer-to-participant ratio provide a quality experience for a large age-range of children and their adults. Cyberneering 2008 will include further developed versions of the three activities shown in 2007 together with three additional activities that cover electronics, optics, and chemical engineering. The overall theme will be to show a variety of engineering disciplines in the computer age.

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.