The aim of this project is to develop and test through real-world research, a digital platform and toolkit that will enable members of the public to engage with local councils and other organisations more effectively in the research, planning and design of the urban environment. The specific domain of this project is people's experiences of mobility and access to the urban environment, and how this changes with age. The project is a collaboration with City Councils in the Northeast Region, and Newcastle's' Age Friendly city initiative. Through VoiceNorth will engage members of the public in the project as co-researchers and co-designers, to collect a body of quantitative and qualitative data on older people's experiences of mobility in the built environment, and to co-design digital tools, information and services to enhance that experience. To achieve this we will design and develop a toolkit of digital sensors to capture evidence and experiences from older people's journeys through and social interactions within the city centre. We will combine this evidence with social research data through interactive architectural visualisations which will support citizens and stakeholder in participatory design of the age friendly city. We will also develop a participatory design platform which will allow members of the general public to access, comment, and vote on design issues, and to add their own experiences of access and the built environment. This extended public engagement in the research and design activities will offer a new model of public engagement in civic decision making. The toolkit and platform will be validated through the design of and deployment of digital interventions in the city. We will also document our findings for policy makers and other stakeholders regionally and nationally.

The digital games market is an enormous and fast-growing industry with extraordinary impact, particularly on young people and increasingly on other segments of the population. The importance of the UK games industry (3rd largest in the world) was underlined in the Chancellor's Autumn statement (5th December 2012), which confirmed substantial tax reliefs for the digital games industry, saying that "the Government will ensure that the reliefs are among the most generous in the world". Enthusiasm for digital games is underlined by a 2012 Forbes magazine article suggesting that, by the age of 21, the typical child has played 10,000 hours of digital games. How can we harness widespread enthusiasm for digital games to contribute to advances in society and science in addition to economic impacts? For example, we can test economic theories by analysing the artificial economies in online games, or we can improve the motor skills of recovering stroke patients by using games based on motion detection devices such as the Wii controller, Kinect or simply the mobile phone. In this proposal we will bring the UK digital games industry closer to scientists and healthcare workers to unlock the potential for scientific and social benefits in digital games. The numbers of games sold and the numbers of game hours played mean that we only need to persuade a small fraction of the games industry to consider the potential for social and scientific benefit to achieve a massive benefit for society, and potentially to start a movement that will lead to mainstream distribution of games aimed at scientific and social benefits. In order to do this we need to understand the current state of the digital games industry, by engaging directly with games companies and with industry network associations like the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network. We have a group of 12 games companies and 9 network organisations, all of whom have pledged their support, to get us started. Then we need to build simulation models that will allow us to investigate what might happen in the future (e.g. if government policy were to encourage the development of games with scientific and social benefits). We need to conduct research into sustainable business models for digital games, and particularly for games with scientific and social goals. These will show us how businesses can start up and grow to develop a new generation of games with the potential to improve society. Every action in an online game, from an in-game purchase to a simple button push, generates a piece of network data. This is a truly immense source of information about player behaviours and preferences. We will explore what online data is available now and might become available in the future, investigate the issues around gathering such data, and develop new algorithms to "mine" that data to better understand game players as an avenue for making better games, societal impact and scientific research. It is an ambitious programme, but the potential benefits if we are even partially successful could have a huge impact on children, science and wider society.