 Professor Lisbeth Whitman from the University of East London SmartFab. Thank you very much and thank you all for your patience in the setup. I am, as they say in America, legally blind, so while I see very well to function in the world, hitting little tiny buttons is not what my lenses are tuned in for, so it really could take ages for me to do a simple small thing. Big things are much easier. So I'll just start, what I've done is prepared a video, which is exactly 35 minutes long and I'll talk over it. And what it does is introduce what SmartLab is, what our method is, how we evolved from the Open University BBC and it was a fantastic introduction to have the previous talk there. A lot of what I'm going to address comes from our experience of working with the Open University BBC for eight years and then evolving through other formats until we're collaborating closely again with BBC R&D now. So I'll explain that, show you some examples of some of our main projects, one of which will be Dancing Live this evening in the theatre across campus with two of our colleagues with severe cerebral palsy and some other disabled dancers and some virtual dancers. So I hope you'll all come to that and I'll introduce that project briefly. But the main focus of my talk, which I called Building the Arc, is really about basically in recent years I've begun to describe the building of the SmartLab PhD program as building an arc. It's a space as the last part of this presentation will show where it is safe to explore, create, collaborate, take time off, have a family, have children, be disabled, work in teams, not work in teams, get feedback from many different people and continue your studies, whether one to many, to many, or one to one in whatever format works and where the team will help you to create the technology tools to enable you to do whatever you need to do. So that program has now been running our PhD program for 15 years. Our first graduate was from the Open University, linked to our BBC research there. We've now graduated 30 successful PhDs, all with a practical base to their work. We'll just pause it for a second or third. Yeah, thanks. And we've got another current cohort of 35 students and a constant queue of people wanting to join the program. And I think it's because of our method, the way we work and what we're trying to do with that practice-based PhD program. So that's where I'm going with this talk and I hope that that's relevant to you. I thought it would be useful if I take you through the stages of what SmartLab is, why we work in this mad way that's so hard to describe without the video and introduce you to some of the key players, some of whom are across campus right now rehearsing as well. So that's the plan. I hope it makes sense. And I will just shout over top of this video and I just need to know how to restart it again. On this keyboard down here. Show me which keyboard you're using. Okay, cool. I'll shout over top. And where's the volume in case I need to bring it down? Okay, hopefully. Perfect. Thank you. Perfect. Yay. So I'm just going to start shouting over top of myself. Can you just drag it? Yeah, perfect. Can everybody see? Okay. And hear okay? Sorry. Okay, sorry. Everybody can see in here? Don't be shy. Please don't be shy. Okay, so I'm going to start. And now I just need to know... Sorry on this machine how to... Goodness me. Is that the big button? It makes it big. Woo-hoo. Okay. So SmartLab has a series of projects which have focused on bridging the digital divide over the years and are not-for-profit activism has linked closely with our research and knowledge exchange programs to provide a rich digital dividend pool too. I've described 30 practice-based PhDs and you'll meet some of them now, many of them are now our adjunct faculty. And so I wanted to focus on learning models, social networks, and community building from the three parts of the SmartLab. Our symbol is the butterfly, the body and the mind are the central part of what we do in engaged performance practice. And this is my introduction to why we need to look at technology now. This is Nancy Griffith singing. And she's singing about the world in which we currently live where there's too much media, where Facebook could take up your whole day, where you don't have time to go to LinkedIn and everybody's inviting you every five minutes, where you can't answer your mobile phone because it rings too often. And most importantly, you cannot pay attention to the people who are in the room with you when they're there, even when they're dying, even when they really, really need your undivided attention because constantly we're all overwhelmed with all this media. And yet we choose to work in the field of media and in the field of education and to try to unhijack ourselves and to take those tools and use them for corporate social responsibility and education. And so our aim really is to bring those two things together and re-embrace the media, but to use it constructively and creatively in our own time for our own reasons and to connect us to people while they're physically with us. So my own book at the moment, finishing a few books for MIT Press, and my own is about presence and absence and how to remain present when technology wants to call you through the screen and what it means to have an absence, physical, emotional, or educational, and to come back to study. So this is our campus. This is the University of East London. We've been there for three years this month. This is some of the core team. About a third of our team are disabled in various forms and have come through our performance technology programs. These are some examples. It's a very quick montage at the top of some of the work we've been doing is this was in Budapest, in London for the European Commission. What we've been trying to do is create a new model of education which respects the individual creativity of every learner and every teacher as equals and that uses both technology and performance, including physical rehabilitation after severe injury as a form of performance through human movement to connect people in a whole variety of projects and in any project or event like this we ran for the European Commission. These kinds of projects, the aim is not to have the technology take over but to have Fiona or some of our artistic colleagues working equally as equals with the robot developer and with the person who has lost her leg to create something together, all of them contributing equally to some shared joint project from which all of the others learn. That's what we're trying to do. So this is my group in New York, the Budapest Group. We've set up sites all over the world to work with us. So we're just setting up sister sites, all of which are for free. We operate as a not-for-profit so long as we can afford to bring a team and set up, we give away everything that we do and I'll come back to that model in a minute. This is our main studio at University of East London where we do some of these knowledge cafes where creative business professionals and corporate social responsibility leaders from industry come in to meet individual students who get to pitch their PhD proposal to someone who might fund not only that, but the whole project around it for the next three to five to ten years or who might build a team. These are some of the previous students who are now all adjunct faculty members. For instance, Daria Dorish who you just saw there was Dean of the Fashion Institute in New York for 20 years but had never had time in her life to do a PhD and she came to do it with us part-time and is now a faculty member leading other mature students, largely women in this way. So that all community sectors engage creatively and positively with business so that business begins to fund education in a real way from the ground up. So for instance, Google wanted a group of women technologists to talk about what Google could do to celebrate women's achievements but also to get more women involved and this woman Sapna Ramnani who's a filmmaker who makes gorgeous films but who has previously had to have her helpers help her to edit them because she has severe cerebral palsy. So that's the man who's across campus rehearsing right now to create a system where Sapna can edit herself so linking an eye gaze system to Final Cut Pro so that Sapna will control her own learning and her own creative expression. There's a range of projects and all I'm going to do now is introduce some of them and why we work this way. So we explore issues in terms of artist business technology and the group defines themselves as explorers or sometimes they call themselves gypsy scholars and they call me their choreographer of creative chaos meaning that we work in physical ways, everyone of whatever level of physical ability and some of these people you're looking at here are blind but we move and we make sure that it's safe for everyone to move first and then we move together. Some of these performers here in our Singapore studio are blind others are deaf Bobby here, my main dance partner who's performing this evening you'll see has a very unusual arm technique in his dance and in all of this work what we're teaching in these exercises is how to trust each other and how to make sure it's safe to trust each other before you start to share your ideas and before you what the students here in New York are doing are creating their ways of moving which then inform their avatars which are their virtual learners which we then put into the virtual learning environment but first we embody it so that there's never a moment when you just leap into some virtual world and you don't really know who's in there with you and what you're thinking or whether you would choose to be with them in person first we make sure there's some connection so a lot of what we do is physical techniques every morning of a seminar everyone gets involved the computer engineers and the architects and the city planners and the medical doctors dance and jump and sing and shout with all the performers and the performers have to sit down and learn a bit of coding or at least what it means to code and how to build a markup or a macchiator how to install some technology in some fashion so that everyone understands each other's space before they share a space so this is one of our biggest projects called club tech it's just changed its name to smart smart clubs this year at Microsoft's request it's the the first project that we accepted from Microsoft and we were we were very wary about it I'll let you hear music inspiring you to learn technology and plan an exciting way with a focus on the arts and use the advantages of technology to empower itself to teach tech skills the program has an emphasis on internet learning and internet ethics as well the club tech program brings innovation together with hard work and great fun in a number of areas youthnet is a moderate space rate for sharing stories in real time online the digital arts is a software set for skills training program providing creative content and skills development for job training that kids just can't get enough of club tech does more than help with homework but that helps too known for years in the US as the positive place for kids with after-school programs and a strong emphasis on teaching young people the values of citizenship and unhealth and physical education BGCA was once thought of primarily as a swim and gin space where kids would also grow as individuals today BGCA is older and also a computer skills and future careers heart out with the creative vision to match the needs of the 21st century what next today more than ever issues internet security and personal safety are paramount for kids around the world the next phase of club tech will require a world partnership and creative solution to these local and global problems the club tech program has created best practices model for educational technology that looks set to grow and grow club tech has also transformed the BGCA putting technology and innovation at the center but more supported music innovative thinking in the order of the day and the club tech provides the tools so 5.3 million of the poorest kids in America have used that program now for five years and we're bringing it to Europe next month London will be the first space but we're looking for partners and then next year we roll out through Europe, Middle East and Africa so if anyone's interested in that we have an adult version now and we're focusing now on teens to critical information about domestic violence through online access specialized dealing centers allow participants to safely communicate with domestic violence specialists volunteer attorneys survivors and mentors in secure and moderated chat environment with the technology a digital bridge called safety net was created to address an old problem in a new way safety net offers participants easy, no-cost anonymous access to information and domestic violence advocacy safety net has no borders live or online and is inclusive non-discriminatory sensitive to all ages, geographical location economic connection gender sexual orientation physical ability and language the safety net project encourages the active involvement of women, men and children safety net team has developed prototypes including two major lines of safety wear clothing and accessories incorporating capabilities for safety and communication sensing via GPS, Bluetooth, microchip and smart card technology we hope to work on site in local shelters to enable women to use local materials, fabrics and traditional skills to make fashion items without violence thereby empowering women's freedom through economic self-sustainability and also producing a range of globally made garments ready for insertion of the safety net technology system for those in need our fashion lines have been featured at prestigious seagraph cyber fashion shows for two years now at the 2004 International Computer Interactive Conference our team was one of only five groups invited to showcase its cyber fashion and in 2005 we took pride in place amongst the teams having made major strides for fashion and women's rights our teams are expanding and our ideas and energy are limited but our resources dictate the efficacy of our efforts and women and children are being heard in every country, in every street at all times right now, from the very near you, we need to help help us to hear that sound and help us to respond please donate generously and help us to help self violence against women and children they stop to violent they go to safety net I'll come back at the end of these case studies to what I think this has to do with the state of education and how we can better use technology and PhD programs a lot of the women you saw in that video at the internet for 15 years helped us to invent one of the online learning tools that we're using now which started at the Open University BBC but it took a group of women who had real, very specific physical need for safety to teach us how best to use a tool we had made for standard learners and to roll it out for free around the world so that people can tell their stories so I'll come back to that the next project is linked to the one that you'll see this evening which I don't normally can't do so but it's for people who have no physical voice in this case because of advanced cerebral palsy but it could be any condition in this particular case we're looking at the interface of the mitobi screen which my colleague Mick will introduce it's an eye control system which means that you can control the computer with your eyes it's not just like reading your eye movements you're able to actually make things happen on the screen the idea is that if you find the right way and right end of it you're able to control the disability they can do anything on the computer that anyone else can the difficulty is finding the right interface those of my eyes there and this particular system will let me move my head and still make up my eye movement so even if I have a physical disability that means that I move backwards forwards or sideways it'll still make up my eye movement so for people with a range of disabilities this kind of technology enables them to be able to communicate and control the computer very successfully and directly basically we're working very closely with James and we're doing what he wants us to do and what he wants to do is he wants to be able to write more quickly to be able to communicate more quickly and effectively and that's partly why one of the aspects of the way of what he wants to communicate is through music there's his poetry and also we'll be able to label him to design as well so that he has the full opportunity and the rest of it is to express himself you can't guarantee that if someone uses eye control a little bit physically you can't say that what you have to do is you have to try a certain system as well as you possibly can and then say how does it feel and so far the way that the world that we've done so far it's nice efforts so I'll turn down the volume just to shout over the music for a minute so what you're seeing here is James leading a jam so for a 32 year old guy who had never been able to play music or speak James is now able to using his eyes play tracks of music that he's helped to write with the musicians we work with who've recorded especially what he wanted the instruments what he chose over three years we've been working together to create a score like an emotional lexicon that enables James to have a range of emotional registers to his voice Woody Allen or someone else or as you see here a chance to riff live in a musical scenario with professional musicians where James is leading so Magic Hyperwitz here responds to James leading and as James looks at the sax or the trombone or whatever he's playing that's the sound that comes out at the level he chooses as he stares at the screen and dwells his eyes that's the music and the musicians response so we'll be performing that live in a duet this evening as part of our show if you want to come but beyond the music it's a way to express yourself creatively and by using that system we're enabling James to write a book with us for MIT Press which is about just in time technologies and even way too late technologies why has it taken to the age of 32 before James could tell us anything and why is Katie who you're about to meet here this is Katie Gilligan who's also dancing this evening is 24 and tonight for the very first time anywhere she will speak herself in real time so do come to that she's an amazing lady and why at the age of 24 is tonight the first time she's going to speak herself that's way way way too late technology because all the tools existed they were used for marketing and we figured out or our team figured out how to take the stuff that people use to figure out how can you sell more Coca Cola or I don't know surf detergent by tracking where people's eyes are on big billboards and how can you make those systems smaller and then use them for education and communication so Mick is behind all of that this is our BBC R&D project of the moment we've always had one since we left the beep and my colleague Camille who's also performing this evening will introduce it so Camille's PhD is based on this project called MindTouch about finding new ways to communicate via mobile phones performance and with many concepts I'm using for my project involve looking at the quality and sensations of liveness and presence in mobile performance projects and if they exist or if there are anything different from internet based performance projects and from this metaphor I'm creating a participatory performance installation a series of performance installations that play with this idea of the mobile network and presence well there's three stages of the project and I will go through them but I wanted to talk about the metaphor that guides the project and the metaphor is the idea if you could share your dreams with physical body dreams wake up in the morning traveling lovers etc how could you do that and I'm trying to create a simulation of that kind of experience or exchange the idea of being if I could wake up and exchange my dream with someone telepathically and share the physical and visual elements of that dream how could I do that with some help and expand or explore the dream the simulation is creating a connection between mobile phones but capturing and sharing a visual video of the body experiences through the phones and also collaborating by the feedback sensors that can capture breath calls skin reactions to also share perceptions of the body this is Bobby who will be dancing with us this evening in choreographed this piece so I can't go on too much more about those particular case studies except to say I hope you get the point that those and 45 other projects running at the moment and loads of archival projects are all about how do we encounter how do we create better new virtual worlds better than Second Life safer than Second Life cheaper than Olive more customizable than anything out there playable on mobile phones usable in the developing world for free if need be provided for free to those who need it for communication or healing or meditation but certainly for physical rehabilitation and to the elderly which is our other main user group I haven't spoken about so together we try to bring communication together to create sustainable growth models for educational tools development and we do that through a group of people working together in what we call the magic lab so our main play room and we call it the play room in our new studios is the multimedia and games innovation center and our aim there is to make rapid prototyping tools available for free to people who've never had access to technology before and to see what they'll make so some of these 2D to 3D prototyping tools where you can print out a whole sculpture or a replica or a model of something we've bought all those tools but unlike other programs that only provide them if you sign up to some universities IP contract I'm not naming names let's just say we don't do that anyone can come and use these tools whenever they want to and be trained in the technology so school kids Bengali women's groups where we work a lot of disabled people fashion designers who want to figure out how to install technology into garments and objects and handbags and engineers who want to prototype things cheaply before they build big scalable models so Toby Boiland who you'll also meet this evening who runs this is an engineer who created the world's most accurate sundial as part of his PhD project who's a sculptor and engineer who brings those 2 bodies of knowledge together with the love for young kids and he was homeless himself for a long time and with an understanding of what it means to enable people often homeless people or people who've been disenfranchised in some very real way perhaps for a very long time to feel comfortable in a space and safe in a space to ask questions and to try out new ideas so these are some examples of what Toby and Jerry here and the rest of the team have made in the lab and what we're doing next is as the new development of the Microsoft project to leap backwards and Microsoft has given us permission to open source all of the tools that we've been using in the Microsoft project and to add in all our open source tools and send them out as a free package to any club that can set up so there's Toby the mad inventor so the idea is scalability and then to test what people learn and finally I come to our PhD program so it's the last 10 minutes you'll be pleased to hear and you will have seen some of this footage before but I want you to see how the same people involved in those projects and lots of other projects in both of our wings the creative industries wing and the not-for-profit safety net trust kids in hospital charity wing work together through this shared space to achieve their own PhDs but to work in teams who are also achieving larger social goals that have to do with technology and the other user group I haven't spoken about is Aboriginal communities so we offer individualized programs of study where every student gets at least three supervisors from different disciplines and an online space for constant communication and feedback which is monitored and safe for them and co-created them so that's what we're doing and that's what we're doing and that's what we're doing and that's what we're doing and that's what we're doing and that's what we're doing so that we've monitored and safe for them and co-created by them as an open source tool and where students live all over the world and engage in their full time practice all over the world but join us three times a year in London for really intensive weeks of group critiquing feedback and then once a month online and as often as they want to otherwise but that's the bare minimum we have three main clusters performance technologies, virtual worlds and assistive technology including robotics research groups under those and they cross-pollinate all the time. And basically we're in ethically committed, socially committed and engaged technology transfer unit, a research center trying to make an impact locally one-to-one and then globally through those two wings. With the aim of finding and gathering the smartest, most creative and socially engaged people who could, if run on board together, make a real and lasting contribution not only to the world of scholarship but also to a future world not yet invented. Smart Lab first set sales in the BBC Open University Studios some 15 years ago with a new style of practice as PhD with specific aims and objectives that are transformative. Hence the local on the side of our ship is the butterfly, the ultimate symbol of transformation, intellectual, physical and social. The University of Glasgow at my PhD was on the basis of women from the 1890s to the first world. Basically you're going to meet some of the faculty in real form and virtual form. And many qualified scholars for every sport. We also seek and handpick exceptional candidates from non-traditional backgrounds and bring those people together with high level scholars in teams to address social, academic and technological issues and ideas together. My PhD at the University of Surrey was on the effects of new technologies and philosophy on data discourse. By working in this way we ensure that each student completes a highly original PhD and also that the nature of the PhD process grows and is informed by a transdisciplinary team spirit respecting both theory and practice. Many of our students are themselves senior professionals with many years of experience in academia and the creative industries. They come on board the Smart Lab Arc three times a year for intensive collaboration and group critique. And throughout the year they also inhabit a real and virtual safe space system for creative exchange. I recently did my PhD based on the creation of interactive movies by the making of them and the testing of them with audiences. We aim not only to support each individual to complete a highly original PhD but also to contribute as a group to the future of the PhD degree itself. The Smart Lab Arc is thus a place where preserving the best of the all trying and testing modes of research which can be carried to new lands and of co-inventing the most exciting and sustainable new research models for the next generations too. The Smart Lab Arc moves from place to place and has travelled through four universities since we launched and has set up many collaborative sister sites too. Next to my college students I work at Smart Labs. My PhD was on cultural representations of warfare in particular. That's what warfare is. Nearly done here and then I'll wrap up. So it's about independent research of combining high level scholarship and activism. Our PhD is with unusual backgrounds and abilities and talents who if brought aboard at the right time with the right support alongside top scholars from complementary fields could invent new ideas and new ways of working. So we operate a buddy system whereby both students and faculty work in teams across and between disciplines. This is the key to the program's success. Our basic aim with the PhD is to provide the highest quality, most intensive and supportive environment for interdisciplinary groups trying to take their research. Each with a single unique project leading to a PhD but each contributing to a group's higher knowledge too so that each cohort completing contributes more than the sum of the parts. The easiest way to explain our program is to say briefly what it is not. It is not a standard UK PhD where a student might go for years without supervision or feedback and might have people named on the supervisory team who are not experts in the field nor committed to the student or the project. It is not a lonely solo enterprise of academic study in an ivory tower. It is not a program that runs Monday to Friday 9 to 5 p.m. We work flexibly across seven days of the week and evenings too as some of our team will always be rising somewhere in the world as others are heading home for the evening. My name is Anna Birch and I'm looking at gender in life, immediate performance. The art respects time zones and everyone's right to equal engagement from all over the world. What SmartLab is, it is a meeting place for the minds and a space for exchange between performance and technology, scholarship and professional practice. It is a place where theater names inform everything we do as they return us all to that state of unsubconscious experimentation that opens the mind to new thoughts and new ways of thinking. SmartLab is thus more than a research centre, it is a community, a family of scholars who are travellers, thinkers, makers and doers and who share the aim of inventing new modes of being that care for the world and for all the people in it. In both real space and in our virtual environments, our symbolic arc has taken the form of a pirate ship, a symbol for our social model of borrowing from the rich who are often in industry and giving to the poor who are often artists. Or in a more politically correct way, we have an ethos of sharing the world's riches in terms of access to the knowledge economy and of sharing that wealth from within. Many of the SmartLab graduates return to the full desire of faculty with a wish to share their knowledge and their energy in understanding about community model with the next generation of scholars. I'm very proud of the SmartLab family, all its generations and its newest arrivals too. This is not a pride of ownership but of inspiration. Each new student and each new faculty member comes to the team which in the arc carry knowledge and talent and a deep sense of caring. This last requirement is the most important part of the admissions process. All the smart people in the world could not achieve the social and educational transformations that the world requires without that deep and profound social commitment being highlighted and developed together as part of the scholarly process. It's a privilege to work with each and every SmartLab student and with all of the faculty and to learn from them as well as with them on each staff on our journey, live and online. Just while the credits play just one minute I don't want to run over but I think that the most important point and it was fantastic that we had the BBC presentation first. For me the reason I started this program not only because I didn't have supervision for my own PhD and it was a lonely enterprise with no feedback whatsoever and I decided to create a program where no one else would have to go through that. But more importantly technology has changed in the past 15 years and many of the students you've seen and many of you I'm sure have helped to change it to the point where when my first Shakespeare lecture for Open University BBC I was told one day that my books were a routledge bestsellers and the videos were selling and British Council was sending them all over the world and there were 6,000 registered students but 6.5 million drop-in viewers for the lectures that we were doing. And I thought for a minute that's fantastic and then I thought it really isn't because how do I know whether they understand what's happening. It was before the days of interactive media so 6.5 million people who you couldn't look in the eyes and say did you get that or should I repeat or do you need to see that from a different angle or should I explain again with a different example and that's why we founded Smart Lab. We set up BBC Interactive Media Group in the Shakespeare course first and then in other parts of the Open University and we started working together with BBC engineers who still work with us today on creating tools where people could tell their stories and so I hope it hasn't seemed like a totally unconnected story to us. After 15 years that same team who helped me make the first BBC Interactive program which then got a lot of attention from BAFTA and the rest of it we then just took that tool and stripped it down to the barest bones in our free time and I took it to all the women's shelters where I was working and those women told us how they needed to use it for instant translation, for private communication, for storytelling of a very different kind with the social need and then we began to understand how disabled people, Aboriginal people and all kinds of other communities need these tools one to one first and then one to many many. So I hope that makes some sense to you and I'm very happy to tell anybody more about it and please do come to the show. All these amazing people are over across the campus. Thank you. But we're almost out of time and it's my job to keep us in time. Have we got just one question for this please or are you all blown away? Shall I say we are going to take questions after the show this evening if you do come from the whole team so if you have questions after do you? Great. Well thank you very much for coming to the session. Can we take one more? The universities in the world ran PhDs more like the art that you've described. I mean do you think it's extensible to other universities or is there some very very special magic that can't be taken and replicated away from smart lab? No and I think you know maybe I shouldn't say that the business model dictates that I should not say that but the fact is I think that of course we all do this and I'm sure all of you with your students care just as much as I do about about mine and give just as much and caring is the social glue that makes the whole thing work but it is sustainable and strategically we have remained independent so since we left the open university we've been an independent organisation based at the University of Syria and then based at Central St. Martins and now based at University of East London working closely and respecting those institutions but able to move and therefore able to maintain an open source policy, develop it, work with industry and grow so we do now have formal smart lab programs in New York, LA and as of next week Cairo and Dubai and what's interesting is not only how many sites want to develop a smart lab but the very different social needs and one thing I haven't said is we began largely as a women's team for a long time both the faculty and the students were all women apart from Chris Hales who was our honorary man for a long time and that was not a strategic choice it happened and it happened because the people attracted to our flexible time frame and the fact that you could bring your kids to the seminars if you needed to and all the other things that fit in with women's lives fit but also that there was an awful lot of communication and social theory as well as educational theory informing what we were doing and the women were drawn to it at first now we're almost 50% men and a big mix of people but we're constantly surprised by the new groups of people who ask could we set up a smart lab and what would that be so I think it's totally scalable great well thank you so much to both our speakers I've been totally entranced and I'm really sorry that I'm the person who has to keep up the time here wish us a wish thank you oh part of this with the smart lab as well thank you