Involves the co-production of research, collaborative methods, critical analysis of questions of power, and value and expertise in research

Focusses on challenges, opportunities and approaches to collaborative research and practice for sociodigital futures, building on best practice to develop a collaborative ecosystem with the Centre’s partners.

Core activities include:

• mapping the field of collaborative working methods and evaluation across disciplines and sectors
• identifying the specific challenges when collaborating with diverse publics, including questions of power, value and knowledge and expertise
• building a culture of collaboration for creating plural, sustainable and democratic sociodigital futures with partners and beyond, and
• implementing legacy plans for long-term sustainable collaboration.

Team members:

• Lead: Professor Morag McDermont (University of Bristol, Law)
• Professor Helen Manchester (University of Bristol, Education)
• Professor Debbie Watson (University of Bristol, Policy Studies)

Covers innovation, experimentation and intervention as well as co-design and futures design

Design-led approaches to sociodigital research and innovation (including design anticipation, adversarial design, collective design and responsible innovation) represent creative spaces for arts-social science-engineering capacity building. Innovation in this context is understood as an opening up of sociomaterial relations to ask questions of existing practices in order to explore and design new ones. By integrating the material and immaterial, design thinking provokes interpretive dialogue between pasts, presents and the construction of future realities.

Core Activities include:

• mapping the field of design practice for sociodigital futures research
• experimentation to grow an ‘inter-discipline’ of anticipatory co-design
• building an inventory of inventive ‘co-design’ methods, using physical-digital tools/applications for imagining, materializing and convening sociodigital futures including the Future Places toolkit
• commissioned futures design projects though the UAL Masters programme (including Graphic Media Design, Service Design, Interaction Design, Creative Computing), and
• building and creating innovative products, services, policies, technologies, systems and other designs for sustainable, inclusive futures.

Team members:

• Lead: Professor Helen Manchester (University of Bristol, Education)
• Dr Paul Clarke (University of Bristol, Theatre Studies)
• Marion Lagedamont (London College of Communication, UAL)
• Dr Georgina Voss (London College of Communication, UAL)

Futures-focused, encompassing 'futuring' capacity of conventional methods and new and emerging forms of data (NEFD)

Drives three related lines of inquiry:

• interrogation of the affordances of futures-focussed methods for sociodigital research and intervention (from predictive methods such as forecasting and scenario planning to constructivist and performative approaches such as anticipation studies, design fictions, linguistic analysis, visioneering and constructive technology assessment)
• systematic investigation of the temporal and ‘futuring’ affordances in conventional social science methods, and
• exploration of the use of New and Emerging Forms of Data (NEFD) and computational methods for sociodigital futures research.

Core activities include:

• building a critical methodological base and effective techniques for systematic sociodigital futures research
• workshops with the empirical research programme and external partners
• ‘masterclasses’ and resources for capacity-building in methods for empirical analysis and participatory action research (e.g. speculative design, social science methods for social media analytics, web scraping, futures literacy, policy experimentation).

Team members:

• Lead: Professor Richard Owen (University of Bristol, Business School)
• Professor Susan Halford (University of Bristol, Sociology)
• Professor Genevieve Liveley (University of Bristol, Classics)
• Dr Emily Spiers (Languages and Cultures, Lancaster University)

Explores landscapes and foundations for sociodigital future making

Acts as a hub for participants in the Centre to examine the profound ontological and epistemological questions raised by researching sociodigital futures. It creates opportunities to examine diverse intellectual perspectives that explicitly and implicitly address futures-oriented research, particularly with respect to their dependence upon Anglo-European epistemological foundations, and explore the gaps, absences, tensions and synergies that arise. Key areas of dialogue include underpinning conceptions of temporality, power, ethics, culture, responsibility and inequalities.

Core activities include:

• theoretical mapping/landscaping activity across future-specific theories and future-relevant theories
• workshops with the empirical research programme
• theory building for empirical analysis and methodological development, and
• developing ethical frameworks and resources.

Team members:

• Lead: Professor Keri Facer (University of Bristol, Education)
• Professor Richard Owen (University of Bristol, Business School)
• Professor Dale Southerton (University of Bristol, Business School)