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.

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.

In 2019, the Government identified 100 towns that qualified for additional support in four key areas: transport, broadband connectivity, skills and culture. The latter three, in particular, are closely aligned. Culture, and the skills and digital connections necessary to develop, promote, and sustain it, help build the civic infrastructure to tackle urgent social and economic issues. Equally, a vibrant and diverse cultural life grows the creative economy, attracts and retains the young people who can revive depleted town centres, and bridges socially or fractured or divided semi-urban communities. The case for regeneration in our towns has been radically strengthened by the ongoing crisis of COVID-19: the economic challenges faced by SMEs, retail organisations, and the culture, heritage and creative industries have quickly become urgent. Yet this might also herald a moment of reflection and transformative opportunity in smaller communities in particular, as the new local and digital networks shaped by the collective social, mental, and economic challenges of the pandemic start to emerge. The behavioural and organisational adaptations by governments, businesses, and individuals may well also create a seismic shift in our understanding of how rapidly we can effect change by rethinking long-standing strategies, structures, or practices. This project will scope the role that that emerging and innovative multidisciplinary methodologies can play in allowing us to better understand and develop the contributions that culture can make to civic and economic regeneration. Working at the intersection of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the project team will frame the research in relation to the ongoing changes to the social and economic landscapes of towns, and their immediate challenges post-COVID-19. The project will produce a scoping study and report proposing future research directions, opportunities and priorities which will underpin and drive culture's role in the economic recovery and renewal of towns across the UK. It will focus on four case-study towns, identified from the government's '100 Towns' list, and through the robust local community networks of the Victoria County History project, developing transferable, extensible insights, cross-disciplinary methodologies and approaches. The project brings together researchers in the Humanities with Social Sciences specialists at the Centre for Towns Think Tank, with partners Historic England and the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre led by NESTA. It also includes collaborations with Triodos and Starling banks. At the forefront of applied practice, innovation and disruption in their fields, these partners and collaborators will help us think in radical new ways about the research agenda, and identify mechanisms for dissemination and impact.

The overall purpose of the COLDIGIT project is to generate new knowledge on innovative digital tools and approaches, in order to understand how they can support governance of complex societal processes in the Nordic region. Previous research on such digital tools has been disciplinarily and sectorally fragmented, which has limited the horizon of related opportunities and challenges. COLDIGIT will adopt a broad view by empirically exploring various types of collective intelligence tools supported by technology (e.g., crowdsourcing, augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), serious games, e-democracy and e-participation), in three parallel streams of co-creation: i ) co-innovation and co-funding, ii) co-production of knowledge and iii) co-construction of policies and decisions. In particular, the project will catalogue 150-200 cases of innovative digital tools, create a conceptual model of the digital ecosystem of collective intelligence, study obstacles and drivers of adoption and use of new technologies, and test innovative solutions through a series of pilots on participatory budgeting projects in Finland, Sweden, and Norway. To increase the strategic relevance of the findings, COLDIGIT will draw policy advice on how to develop and implement such tools and approaches in ways that contribute to a dynamic and responsible digital transformation of Nordic societies and the United Kingdom. Nesta, the project's UK partner, will lead the parts of the proposed work studying the obstacles and drivers of adoption and the development of policy recommendations.

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.