Open Lab

The group has a world leading reputation for pioneering and developing the subfield of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) known as Digital Civics. This area develops digital technologies to support citizen engagement and community empowerment, in pursuit of education, health and wellbeing, social care and public participation in democratic processes. The strength of our research output is attested to by consistently significant output at ACM CHI (the most prestigious dissemination venue for HCI research).

OL pursues development of theory, methods and technologies, is highly interdisciplinary (both within the group and externally) and works with a broad community of partners (over 30 on the latest funded project). The partners span government authorities, NGOs, charities (local and international), educational organisations, health and social care services (including NHS X/Digital), media companies (BBC R&D) and industry (Microsoft, Google, Mozilla), alongside a broad network of international academics.

Since 2014 OL has been supported (as lead) by a £16.6M portfolio of UKRI-funding, including CDT in Digital Civics, Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC), the Not Equal Network+, and EPSRC Next Stage Digital Economy Centre - the Centre for Digital Citizens (CDC) valued at over £8M. The CDC will fund a programme of Innovation Fellowships for post-docs to support digital social innovation research using novel participation platforms and data-driven technologies with a network of partners and the urban, rural and coastal communities of the North East (and internationally).

An exemplar of our interdisciplinary internal collaborations includes working with MoveLab (NU Institute of Cellular Medicine) to collaborate with Oxford University for the UK Biobank Study. OL and MoveLab expertise was employed to develop wrist-worn accelerometers used as part of the largest ever population assessment of physical activity (100,000+ participants).

Recent extensive collaborations include the International Federation of the Red Cross/Crescent Societies (IFRC) that involved OL developing techniques to drive consultations with more than 3000 members of the organisation’s youth volunteer-base, directly informing and feeding into the IFRC’s Strategy 2030. This was launched in Geneva and further disseminated at that event through a bespoke installation of a VR Escape Room experience (311 delegates in 27 national teams used it). In 2020 we also built a bespoke web platform for IFRC to host their first global Climate Conference to host over 10,000 international delegates to the virtual conference.

In the next 5 years, the new CDC will pioneer processes of digital social innovation for social and environmental sustainability and will act as a catalyst for further research development. To achieve this the group will continue to explore design futures and the development of collaborative digital platforms using new algorithmic, data-driven and AI technologies to support future living and new models of participatory education, health and social care, and local democracy. OL will also pursue further challenges in developing digital support for Sustainable Development Goals in international contexts and pushing the digital civics agenda towards an environmentally focused Sustainable Digital Society agenda. Further to the digital healthcare interests, OL will also continue behavioural informatics work to develop new ML techniques for activity recognition in pursuit of digitally enabled healthcare interventions, in particular, using wearable sensor platforms.

• Ridita Ali
• Rob Anderson
• Simon Bowen
• Caroline Claisse
• Clara Crivellaro
• Abi Durrant
• Dan Jackson
• Ahmed Kharrufa
• Dave Kirk
• Ivan Poliakov
• Lei Shi
• Vasilis Vlachokyriakos