By Theo Richardson-Gool
On behalf of the Impact Development Challenge Event delivery team
In 1959, C.P. Snow argued that the sciences and the humanities had become separated into "two cultures", limiting their ability to address our biggest challenges together.
During an Alan Turing Institute event in late 2025, Snow's challenge reemerged during a discussion on the White Paper, Doing AI Differently. An expert panel from computer science, the humanities and the social sciences, highlighted: the divide still exists, and we all need to get better at co-creation.
With that in mind, and with support from UKRI Impact Acceleration Account funding, I worked with colleagues in Bristol’s Division for Research Enterprise and Innovation (DREI) to design a challenge event. To move this from principle to practice. Invites were sent to researchers from the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Science and Engineering to act as academic co-leads. Prof. Debbie Watson, Prof. Ed King, Prof. Paul Clarke, and Prof. Seth Bullock accepted the invitation. Together, they co-defined the focus: Creative AI for Social Good.
As Prof. Seth Bullock puts it:
"When new technologies like computers or calculators arise, they are often viewed through a quite pragmatic, instrumental, engineering lens: What job can this do? How can it help us be more efficient? Artists, writers, designers, etc., are often missing from the conversation despite the fact that they can bring a very different and much more transformative perspective. But in the case of AI these conversations collide because this emerging technology directly challenges our very notions of creativity, authenticity, language, thought, etc. - so the need to make space for these conversations across the "two cultures" is even more urgent."
Delivering the Challenge Event
On 22 April, we held this AI Challenge Event at Bristol Digital Futures Institute. Forty-five participants joined, including researchers from engineering, theatre, and history, and non-academics experts from the creative sector, AI industry, and community practice.
This diversity reflected Bristol's wider context: a city where infrastructure such as Isambard AI sits alongside a vibrant creative ecology, with grassroots organisations and world-leading research intersecting. Building on this, the academic co-leads set the conditions to bring disciplines and sectors together and enable meaningful collaboration.
On the day Prof. Dave Jarman (Centre for Innovation and Enterprise) led the facilitation, guided participants through a human-centred design process: moving from discovery to collaborative framing, and through iterative feedback to refine ideas.
“It was clear that the event had been thoughtfully planned and executed. The layout of the space worked very well, and the hosting by Dave and the wider team created a welcoming and engaging atmosphere.” - one participant thoughts on the day.
Prof. Jarman asked the group; what’s key for a Creative AI for Social Good project? Real user access. Scalability. Legitimacy. Novelty. Personal Motivation. Viability. Focus. Then, the afternoon moved into live pitches, where participants formed coalitions around emerging ideas and began shaping potential projects. One acknowledges here, non-academic partners played active role, helping to move ideas from discussion toward practical application.
What projects arose from the Challenge Event
The event led to three projects, each awarded £10,000:
Just Enough AI: A collaboration between Dr Matt Dowse (Bristol Business School), Mary Stevens (Friends of the Earth), and Martin O’Leary (Watershed Arts Trust Ltd). The project will develop AI models that organisations with ethical concerns can confidently adopt, supported by use cases, workshops, and a community toolkit.
B⁴: Building Bristol’s Backyard Biophilia: A partnership between Chloe Meineck (Knowle West Media Centre) and Professor Melissa Gregg (Digital Futures). Using the Bristol Wireless LoRaWAN network, the project aims to co-design community-facing nature sensing devices, building technical skills, critical understanding of AI, and new approaches to ecological care rooted in neighbourhoods.
Professionals In/Over the Loop: A partnership between Professor Debbie Watson, Professor Colin Gavaghan, and CGI’s Matt Mullan. Using CGI’s AI Futures Jam workshop approach, the project will engage social workers, lawyers, and students to use and co-develop a creative tool that builds critical understanding of AI and supports more empowered and agentic use.
The projects, reflect Bristol’s strengths as a city characterised by creativity, technical knowhow, and a commitment to social justice. Yes, these projects demonstrate what collaboration can produce. Yet, the approach we took to this Challenge Event, start together, co-create, raised questions about how feasible genuine co-production is.
Looking ahead to co-delivering public value
A tension arose during the Creative AI for Social Good Challenge. Bold blue-sky ideas often emerge before a formal research agenda has taken place, whereas impact funding requires alignment with existing research.
How do you resolve that tension? Could one disrupt the conventional stages where research precedes impact. Indeed, would we form strong partnership foundations if we collapsed conventional timelines and created live learning systems that deliver value now while generating insights that shape current and future research. Is that feasible? The event showed me how hard it is in practice.
That said, speaking as a Bristolian, these kinds of live learning systems will emerge across the city, taking on challenges such as building AI for social good, with or without the University. The opportunity for the University of Bristol may lie beyond bridging the "two cultures"; it could be in harnessing the region's creative and civic energy to connect disciplines, sectors, and communities to deliver public value.