Can virtual spaces help create real world research?
The development of research project proposals, cohort management and even peer review meetings could be radically changed by the use of digital technologies that allow participants to meet in a 3D cyberspace.
This is one of the conclusions to be drawn from a groundbreaking project led by the Transformative Research team at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Dr. Paula Bailey, EPSRC's Senior Transformative Research Manager, says: "This project is unqiue in terms of scale and potential application. Technologies such as Collaborative 3D Virtual Spaces could support more efficient and cost-effective ways of working for EPSRC; offering significant savings on meeting and travel costs, travelling time as well as in our carbon footprint. Removing physical restraints in the design and running of events would also allow working without geographical constraints, potentially opening activities to a wider audience. This supports our efforts to operate ever more efficiently in a time of budgetary constraint, including finding new ways of working."
EPSRC staff are delivering the project by working closely with a team from the Horizon Digital Economy Research at the University of Nottingham. Over the past year the Horizon Digital Economy Hub have provided technical support and are running an independent scientific evaluation of the project.
Professor Derek McAuley, Director of the Horizon Digital Economy Hub, highlights that while conference calls or talking heads style video conferencing can be usable for a traditional chaired round table meeting, supporting workshop activity using break out groups to investigate creative solutions needs a more flexible platform that allows for a flow of people into and out of virtual spaces in an intuitive way.
McAuley says: "Interdisciplinary and inter-institutional working is now part of the everyday lives of academics, and it is great to see EPSRC both funding innovations in how we can work and underpinning it with solid research into its effectiveness."
Running over a three and half day period, the recent Creativity Greenhouse event involved members of the academic community trialling whether facilitated creativity activities could be carried out with participants in various locations remote from each other, supported by digital technologies. The event saw seven participants develop novel multidisciplinary research ideas on the topic of 'IT as a Utility', part of the RCUK Digital Economy Theme.
The event, using techniques that were similar to those used in the EPSRC IDEAS Factory sandpit, consisted of:
• One physical day, covering technology training and some 'getting to know you' activities;
• 2.5 virtual days the following week with facilitated sessions covering most of the working day.
One of the participants, Professor Irene Ng, from WMG at the University of Warwick, said that the project that emerged, SeRTES (Sensemaking Representation of a Technology Enabled Society), was one of the most creative projects she has encountered and certainly very risky and challenging.
Professor Ng says: "The project aims to provide a means of visualising the hidden, invisible connections (and barriers) which are created in a technological enabled society and develop a tool capable of mapping and representing the richly diverse collection of inter-related concepts. The project is hugely ambitious but will result in a major impact on businesses, designers, implementers and users if we are successful.
She adds, "I found the event rather different from what I have experienced previously. Being in a 3D collaborative space affords some benefits, e.g. I worked from home and hence when the days activities had finished I was already at home with my family and didn't need to travel. Working virtually is a very different way of working and interacting with others e.g. assessing people's body language is more difficult. However, this is made up for by its other benefits, in terms of being able to cut and paste text on post-its, being able to enlarge the wall sizes at 'a few clicks of a mouse', being able to just saunter around while listening to a lecture (considered to be rude if it was a physical event)."
Professor Irene Ng concludes, "The result of the creative greenhouse was that we went for something all of us could not possibly achieve on our own with the hope that our collaboration would yield something extraordinary."
As the next step in the project, EPSRC plans to stage a further Creativity Greenhouse during the summer with an increased number of participants. Further information about this opportunity will be made available on the EPSRC website shortly.
Provided by EPSRC
