
Measuring the economic value of cultural sites and institutions poses challenges. Traditional economic impact studies have tended to value the market benefits of culture, such as the impacts on employment and gross value added. This ignores the important contribution that culture and cultural institutions play in people's lives. This value is harder to assess as market prices will not exist where cultural institutions/places are free to use or access. However an understanding of this is required for policy evaluation and investment decisions, and not valuing these benefits risks that the activities which generate them are under-appreciated. To further the evidence base in this area, the research is estimating the value of culture at four historic towns/cities and for four cultural institutions located within them (cathedrals or regional art galleries, for example). It will quantify in monetary terms the use values (the values that those who directly use the site put on being able to use them) and non-use values (including the value that non-users place on the sites' existence). The valuation estimates will be obtained using a methodology that meets the criteria required by the UK Government in its evaluation guidance and so will contribute to the evidence base for public investment in culture. The data used in the study will be collected through an online survey. Valuations will be estimated using a contingent valuation methodology, where those surveyed are asked to consider their valuation of the site/institution in the context of a hypothetical scenario that makes them meaningfully consider their valuation in monetary terms. For example, how much they might be prepared to pay to prevent the scenario of damage to a site. The research will also examine the capacity for benefits transfer (i.e. the extent to which values from particular sites can be robustly applied to value other sites), allowing the findings from the study to be potentially applied to other cultural sites. This will be assessed by analysing whether the values estimated are comparable within the sites in the analysis.
The aim of this fellowship programme is to design a socially responsible collective governance for Smart City commons: shared pool of urban resources (transport, parking space, energy) managed and regulated digitally. Smart City commons exhibit unprecedented complexity and uncertainties: transport systems integrate electric, shared and autonomous vehicles, while distributed energy resources highly penetrate energy systems. How can we manage Smart City commons in a sustainable and socially responsible way to tackle long-standing problems such as traffic jams, overcrowded parking spaces or blackouts? Failing to digitally coordinate collective decisions promptly and at large-scale has tremendous economic, social and environmental impact. Coordinated decisions require a digital (r)evolution, a new paradigm on where we decide, how we decide and what we decide. But which are limiting factors? 1.Online decision-making often disconnects citizens from the physical urban space for which decisions are made: choices are less informed and vulnerable to social media misinformation, while decision outcomes may show lower legitimation. What if collective choices could be made more locally as digital geolocated testimonies, creating opportunities for community interactions and deliberation? 2.Voting system design is another origin of poor collective decisions, with majority voting often failing to achieve consensus or fair and legitimate outcomes. What if we expanded the design space of voting systems with alternative voting methods, e.g. preferential, to encompass social values? While such methods have so far been costly and limited to low-cognitive exercises, negating their social value over majority voting, decision-support systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) emerge as game-changer. 3.With an immense computational and communication complexity, large-scale coordination of inter-dependent collective decisions remains a timely grand challenge. What if coordination could be digitally assisted and emerge as a result of smart aggregate information exchange, achieving privacy and efficiency? To address these challenges, I will combine Internet of Things, human-centred AI and blockchain technology with social choice theory and mechanism design. Using IoT devices, urban points of interest can be turned into digital voting centres within which conditions for a more informed decision-making will be verified in the blockchain, e.g. proving citizens' location. A novel ontology of voting features will provide the basis to predict voting methods that generate fair and legitimate outcomes. Using collective and active reinforcement learning techniques on the blockchain, human and machine collective intelligence will be combined to achieve a trustworthy coordination of collective decisions at large scale. In collaboration with high-profile partners from government/industry, I will demonstrate the applicability of these approaches via 4 innovative impact cases. 1.Using the developed solutions, citizens will geolocate problems and vote for transport planning solutions. 2.They will also vote on spot to implement participatory budgeting projects. 3.A smart parking system will be enhanced with load-balancing capabilities to alleviate crowded and polluted city centres. 4.Via citizens' coordination of transport modality, an urban traffic control system will be optimized for an equitable shift to public/sharing transport, while preserving low-carbon transport zones. These Smart City blueprints will open up new avenues for deeper understanding of digitally assisted collective governance. To master this inter-disciplinary research area and develop myself into a future leader, I will visit world-class leaders and, together with my team, enrol in novel training activities. Two esteemed mentors and an advisory board will further support me. I will engage with the broader community of citizens and policy-makers by organizing workshops and hackathons.
Flying High Phase 2 Abstract and Public Summary for IUK Nesta’s Flying High is the first programme of its kind to convene city leaders, regulators, public services, central government and industry around the future of drones in cities. Flying High seeks to position the UK to become a global leader in shaping drone systems that place people’s needs first. In the first phase of Flying High, Nesta engaged five UK cities over six months in 2018 to explore the potential uses of drones/aerial robotics in urban environments, capture public sentiment, propose guidelines on drone use in the public realm and analyse the technical and economic feasibility of five socially beneficial use cases in real-world scenarios - transporting medical supplies among hospitals, responding to emergencies and supporting infrastructure development. Flying High Phase 2 builds on the findings from Phase 1 by designing the testing capabilities and challenge prize specifications for socially beneficial, city-based use cases in the categories of medical transport, emergency response and infrastructure maintenance. Nesta will map urban drone use scenarios based on unique place-based circumstances and regulatory conditions relevant to UK cities; and design and specify the infrastructure requirements for virtual and physical testbed environments for integrated drone services in a complex city environment, based on city demand and CAA requirements. These activities will inform design of an innovation challenge to accelerate development of urban drone services that bring public benefit to UK cities. The project will bring together city stakeholders with national policymakers and regulators, industry, service users and the public to design testing scenarios. Flying High Phase 2 will create the necessary groundwork to launch the innovation challenge and accelerator programme in Phase 3, anticipated to take place over two years beginning Summer 2019. The innovation challenge will consist of a series of stage-gate, outcome-based funding opportunities to prove the viability of real-world urban drone applications. Industry will have the opportunity to develop and prove place-based drone use cases demonstrating technological capabilities based on a viable business case in a UK city. Teams will be required to demonstrate safe, reliable integration of these services in urban airspace, with a particular focus on issues related to extreme environments, like operation in complex airspace near to buildings, safely and seamlessly with other traffic/airspace users, with beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations. The innovation challenge will offer competitive, outcome-based funding; specialised controlled testing environments and public trials; and a collaborative platform to enable technology design, business case development, public engagement and regulatory evolution.
Driven by the growing recognition of the importance of design in national innovation, design policy is an emerging subject of research interest. Design policies are 'sets of rules, activities, and processes to support design through the reinforcement of design capabilities at all levels of the policy cycle' by DeEP. Governments in countries where design and innovation are considered core competitive advantage actively seek to implement policies to create encouraging environments for the prosperity of design innovation. Research into design policy in this context will focus on the relevance and effectiveness of government intervention within the design industry. There is an imperative to advance thinking through collaboration and to share experience. Networking and research in this subject has attracted growing investment. However, collaboration with partners outside of the EU is underdeveloped. A fast changing technology base and novel innovation models allows 'underdeveloped' countries to leap-frog conventional development patterns, with significant impact on the global innovation landscape. Each region can no longer consider its innovation policies in isolation. Collaboration with these countries is as important as with EU partners. This is especially relevant in the case of China, one of the biggest trade partners with EU and the largest R&D investor after the US. China now aims to transform its economy away from a reliance on low-skill and resource-intensive manufacturing, and has recognised the necessity of design innovation in achieving structural transformation of industries. However, these policies and their execution remain unclear outside of China and research in this field is still scarce. In the UK, design is viewed as an important and integral dimension of innovation policy. As one of the largest innovation exporters, it is strategically important for the UK's policy makers to gain knowledge of China, thus enabling them to contextualise their relevance to the UK's design industry and economy, and capture opportunities afforded by transformation in China. Moreover, no consideration has been given to how the UK might best develop policies which capitalise on the opportunities. The study aims to develop a UK-China network in design policy to facilitate interactions between UK and China, and between researchers and policy makers. This network is aimed at professional, educational, and government organizations which might contribute to the development and management of initiatives to either grow business or design capability and capacity. Through a series of workshops and seminars, the project will develop partnerships to share good practices in design policy development and to stimulate discussions on this topic. This project will also help build capacity in design policy research, and will inform the future development of the research networking theme. The project will conclude by undertaking a mapping exercise to understand the focuses and principles of policy making in each country; and from this, identify differences and similarities in the approaches taken by each country in supporting design innovation. This will in turn provide the basis for a generic model of design policy which will be disseminated at a final event to be held in London, and will be used to inform national and regional policies supporting the design sector.
IMPETUS will support and give recognition to citizen science (CS) in Europe. It aims to: * enable more diverse citizen science initiatives (CSIs) to access funding; * bring CS closer to society and policy makers; * acknowledge CS? role in tackling the greatest challenges of our times; and * enable CSIs to contribute to Green Deal (GD) and UN SDG commitments. We will achieve this by: * funding CSIs through 3 open calls, selected on expected impacts, volunteer engagement, EDI, openness and quality data. We will offer 20k? to kickstart 100 CSIs and 10k? to sustain 25 CSIs addressing pressing needs of the European society. Each call will have 2 challenges; we will convene a citizen panel to define one and provide feedback on our work. * setting up an accelerator to provide the funded CSIs with an integrated programme of support, training, mentoring, and resources. The accelerator will facilitate peer learning, enable CSIs to contribute to SDG and GD targets and forge connections with quadruple helix stakeholders. * launching the EU Prize for Citizen Science, awarded to CSIs for outstanding achievements, allowing them to continue and expand their work and showcase it to a wider audience. We will award 3 prize categories for 3 years: outstanding achievements, diversity and innovative grassroots projects. Each time, we will reach out to advisors to identify exceptional nominations and to the citizen panel to vote in the grassroots category. * shaping EU policy in and with CS, through horizon scanning, anticipatory policy and action research, informing policy briefs, webinars and workshops with key policy stakeholders. The aim is to foster more CS data to inform evidence-based policies and identify future directions in CS policy. * developing impact assessment tools and assessing the impact of CSIs and our own framework, especially on GD and SDG targets. Insights will be presented within the wider CS ecosystem and feed into recommendations for national and EU policies.