Newcastle University

A £1.7m multi-disciplinary project which aims to revolutionise the design of technologies for supporting research has been awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the RCUK Digital Economy programme.

The project, entitled PATINA (Personal Architectonics of Interfaces to Artefacts) will be led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with the Universities of Brighton, Greenwich, Newcastle, Southampton and Swansea. The project includes involvement from Microsoft Research, Nokia Research and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Current digital research support systems take attention away from the material that they describe. PATINA will provide researchers with new opportunities to create research spaces that emphasise the primacy of research material, and support the sharing of research activities as well as results.

The consortium will build wearable prototypes that can enhance research objects by projecting related information back into their research space. These technologies will also provide the means to capture, record, and replay the researcher's activities to support intuitive archiving, sharing and publication of interactions with research objects. The design of the technologies will draw on theoretical frameworks of space developed from studies of research spaces as diverse as libraries, museums, homes and archaeological fieldwork sites.

The Newcastle contribution will be led by Dr. Martyn Dade-Robertson of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University.  Dr Dade-Robertson said:   “This is one of a new generation of research projects which seek ways of interacting with computers which are not limited to the mouse and keyboard of deskbound PCs. Rather we are seeking to define computation though physical interactions with the artefacts and spaces of our spatial environment.  This is an ambitious project which will bring together researches from across the arts and engineering to create new theories of design which blur the distinction between the architectonic systems of our physical and virtual worlds.”

The project begins in June 2010, will run for three years, and will be advertising for a post-doctoral research associate to work in Newcastle over the next few months.