Vivienne's research interests lie across creative, immersive and inclusive futures methodologies, joy, play and pluriversal ethics, and the ways in which they can support the realisation of more flourishing human and planetary futures (and presents) for all. 

She currently provides training in Responsible Innovation to EPSRC funded PhD students in 8 Centres for Doctoral Training at University of Bristol. Rooted in EPSRC's AREA framework for Responsible Innovation, this training equips students with the skills and understanding they need to explore Responsible Innovation in the context of their PhD process and beyond. 

To support this work, Vivienne has developed a number of projects in response to emerging themes: 

Narrative Futuring: 2021-ongoing

Developed in response to a lack of futures narratives relating to some of the disciplines in which she was teaching Responsible Innovation, Vivienne has been working with artist Bec Gee to develop Narrative Futuring - a methodology for imagining futures. This methodology supports participants through a series of artistic, imaginative, and critical making exercises designed to enable them to collectively imagine utopian futures that could be created as a result of work in their field. These utopian imaginings are then used as a critical jumping off point to reflect on the utopias and on contemporary practice and values. Whilst originally designed for researchers, the Narrative Futuring methodology is proving widely applicable and most recently formed the basis of a utopias workshop with young artists from Rising Arts Agency for the Festival of Social Sciences. Initial work on this project was kindly supported by pilot funding from the Aerosol Science CDT.

Responsible Innovation Facilitators: 2022-ongoing

EPSRC requires funded Centres for Doctoral Training(CDT) to train PhD students in Responsible Innovation (RI), but also to embed RI in CDT culture. When developing this training, Vivienne also faced the challenge of developing appropriate and tailored training in RI across 8 disparate disciplines, some of which, such as Aerosol Science and Non-Destructive Testing, have no existing material in the ethical/social/RI literature to draw on. In order to address these issues, Vivienne developed the Responsible Innovation Facilitators (RIF) programme. RIFs are recruited from CDT cohorts in year 2+ to support the facilitation of the core programme of workshops, bring discipline specific insights into the evolution of the programme, develop their own workshops tailored to the contemporary interests of their peers and become a “point person” in their CDT who can stimulate conversations in the day-to-day life of the CDT. Alongside supporting the RI programme, the RIF programme is designed to prime research leaders of the future with the skills and confidence to facilitate conversations about RI in academia, industry and beyond.

Resilience Through Nature: 2023-ongoing

Working with early career researchers, imagining the futures that research is helping to create for humanity and the planet, researchers’ anxiety about climate change and its impacts is palpable. Colleagues working with PhD students confirm that these anxieties are having a major impact on significant numbers of students' mental health and wellbeing. With funding from University of Bristol’s Enhancing Research Culture Seed Fund, Vivienne collaborated with Public Engagement Associates Mireia Bes and Ben Meller, coach and Director of Bright Green Futures Roy Kareem, artist Amy Hutchings to develop Resilience Through Nature, a nature-based community building and wellbeing programme for early PhD students. After a successful 2023 programme with a cohort of 16 students, Resilience Through Nature was funded for another year by the Cabot Institute for the Environment who will help support a new cohort of PhD students in 2024. Filmmaker Adam Laity made a film about the project which you can watch on Vimeo.

Exploring Digital Futures Through Play: 2023-ongoing

Digital technologies will profoundly impact many aspects of our future lives. These impacts will be experienced in diverse ways depending on our intersecting identities and how these identities impact our access, power, economic and political realities. Consequently, some communities and individuals will receive less than their fair share of the benefits of digital technologies and more than their fair share of the harms, with little leverage in the digital innovation ecosystem to make their voices heard. In Exploring Digital Futures through Play, Vivienne is working with games makers Coney to harness the power of play to explore futures. Funded by Bristol Digital Futures Institute’s seed corn funding, the project will bring together games makers and digital technology researchers to find out how play can help us feel the futures to better understand how they might impact on a plurality of people and communities. The resulting prototype games will be tested and used in Vivienne’s teaching in Responsible Innovation and could also be used in public engagement processes, by ethics committees and by other sociotechnical researchers.