The fellowship addresses a pressing question of methods to promote future-orientated thinking in relation to climate breakdown. Creative practitioners are increasingly using immersive and embodied participatory techniques, such as role-play, to help people imagine different futures and how these might be achieved, in response to the multiple crises facing the planet. These techniques involve invoking new relations with the world and with each other, intended to inspire a sense of agency, stimulate imagination and promote different kinds of sustainability. Yet little is known about how the design and structure of such 'experiences' create effects. This research uses fine-grained interviewing and observation techniques to explore, with leading practitioners, how these embodied encounters might be working to engage people, how they link personal meaning-making to global issues, and which aspects of embodied, immersive and participatory engagements work best to inspire change across which contexts. With failures of leadership in addressing climate and other ecological crises, there is an 'urgent need to understand how to imagine and enact cultural change' (creaturesframework.org/index.html) and find new mechanisms for societal transformation. The research explores people's feelings and ideas - moment by moment - when they experience role-play (and related immersive embodied 'experiences') designed to change their eco-social orientation, agency and ideas for action. Arts and humanities initiatives that channel affective experience in the service of transformation are gaining momentum because they can offer hope and new pathways for action, inspiring deeper reorientation than information from science alone can. Different alternative futures can be designed and presented through immersive play, affecting people's sense of potential and provoking sensorial, relational, embodied and/or emotional encounters with possibilities. The fellowship research will explore these visions of change and how their design - to enable people to imagine difference by experiencing it - can best be worked into types of immersive situations. By gathering and analyzing accounts from people who have been involved in four locale-based activities (Sussex coast, London Borough of Camden, Suffolk coastal town, Scottish region), it will be possible to derive pointers for designing experiences that help neighbourhoods relate to global challenges, understanding more of the personal elements such encounters inspire and drawing out the commonalities that make such work possible to apply more broadly. This creates new knowledge about the potential of arts-informed methods to perform cultural change and suggests how personal responses, collective change in neighbourhoods and managing global crises can come together in fruitful ways. It will also serve to deliver the kind of detailed research that shows the arts and humanities have an important role to play in creating sustainable and liveable futures, beyond the technical, to look at how lives can be made meaningful at a time of multiple threats. The development component involves two secondments with policy makers to support the fellow's learning. This will give insight into decision-makers priorities, while, at the same time, having impact and learning how impact can be furthered. The engagement component brings research and development together in the commissioning a short immersive participatory workshop to be toured, to capture and share learning from the fellowship about transformative practices at micro-level and their relations to global challenges. The work will be showcased as essays, a book and a short workshop 'taster' of the relevant experiential learning.

Project Partners: Transport Scotland, Scottish Water, SGN, SEPA, Inverclyde Council, National Centre for Resilience, Climate Ready Clyde, Adaptation Scotland/SNIFFER a) Our objective is to develop a game based approach to understand climate change impacts and adaptation on interdependent infrastructures. Using Inverclyde as a case-study, we will develop a transferable approach that identifies local scale interactions and interdependencies, and allows diverse infrastructure partners to jointly think of adaptation solutions. b) Inverclyde is a local authority in the west of the Greater Glasgow region. The urban coastal strip forms a vulnerable corridor. Our project will bring together major infrastructure partners (Transport Scotland, Scottish Water, SGN), with regional partners (Clydeplan, Inverclyde Council), SEPA and national knowledge brokers (Adaptation Scotland, National Resilience Centre) in a 6 month project that focuses on using a game to develop a shared understanding of key multi-hazard risks to infrastructure in the region due to climate change. c) Despite increasing capability to assess specific climate risks to infrastructure, our partners need to better understand vulnerability of infrastructure systems to climate-influenced environmental risks, and key interdependencies between them. Key challenges identified include: (1) translating climate projections into impacts on infrastructure - in particular with event succession, cumulative effects, long-term stresses, and/or multiple hazards; (2) identifying key location hotspots where there is a high multi-operator composite risk that may not be recognised by current practice; (3) understanding interdependencies between infrastructures operations, including varying resilience levels in regulation and license conditions; (4) considering impact of services provided by infrastructures and the socio-economic implications of service degradation or failure. d) At the end of the project, our partners will have: (1) an improved understanding of why and when service interruptions may occur; (2) an improved understanding of the interactions between multiple infrastructure networks; (3) identified key hotspots where the greater risk may not be currently recognised; (4) identified key risks; and (5) access to a game approach for identifying key risks. e) We plan a 6 month project employing one PDRA and contracting out design and development of the card game component. The total cost of the project is £50,777.45 at 80% FEC (£62,596.81 at 100% FEC).

Urban river corridors are experiencing rapid changes in land use and perceptions and offer opportunities to create sustainable, high quality, communities. The hypothesis of the URSULA project (Urban River Corridors and Sustainable Living Agendas) is that there are significant social, economic and environmental gains to be made by integrated and innovative interventions in urban river corridors. We will test this by providing a portfolio of new ideas, new tools and new data to support redevelopment of urban river corridors as places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. We will do this in cooperation with national and local stakeholders, including government, commercial, community and 'non-organised' groups of stakeholders. The key themes of our analysis and way of working are 'people' (living, working), 'river' (ecological goods and services), 'design' (possibilities for intervention and innovation) and 'values' (agents of change, measures of success). We will draw on case studies in Sheffield, the UK and beyond, and test our Outcomes with local stakeholders in Sheffield on the corridor of the River Don and its tributaries. In the design theme we will, with stakeholders, choose a set of new and current ideas which may benefit redevelopment of urban river corridors, for example use of rivers for building climate control, better storm water management, or new urban forms. New field data and design analyses will enable us to understand their potential benefits and impacts. From the field and modelling work in the river theme, a deeper understanding of how urban rivers deliver ecological goods and services to the river corridor will show how the design possibilities can be assessed. The values theme will provide new analyses of the financial and other benefits of urban redevelopment, as well novel tools (e.g. visualisation) to work with stakeholders and understand their preferences. All of these activities will take place within a close cooperation through the people theme with the stakeholder groups, who are central to the project's motivation and measures of success.