 My name is Graham Evans, I'm a Professor in Design Cultures at Middlesex University in London. I'm in an Art and Design School and I'm part of the Eco-Cultural Production Research Group here today at York and we're discussing putting together our final big proposal for which we've been shortlisted to bid to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a four-year research project addressing this interesting theme of Eco-Cultural Production. Eco-Cultural Production is a concept, it's not something that has an easy definition but if we break it down we're looking at eco-ecosystems, culture, people and society, how cultural expression and people relate to the outside world and their everyday and production, which is not just kind of economic, producing things of value but producing experiences, services and more broader quality of life. So Eco-Cultural Production I guess is looking at that relationship between culture and nature, people in the environment but particularly through a kind of arts and humanities or if you like a cultural perspective. The knowledge gaps for the last couple of hundred years in Western society, the arts and culture and humanities have really been separated from science and in our sphere Eco-Cultural Production I guess we're looking at the separation between environmental science, hard science around notions of sustainability and arts and culture and really how people feel and the meanings and the symbolic and other cultural values that people associate with nature and the environment. So our project is really trying to interrogate bringing those two together through using creative artists to interpret environmental science. I'm in an art and design school so we have academics that are also arts practitioners, fine artists, designers, people working in media, people working in visual arts, performing arts in film and video for instance. So we will be using that expertise and some of their particular research methods really to engage in communities in local areas around environmental places like city farms, community woodlands. Use artists if you like to try and reach the parts that other interventions and other research hasn't reached. That will include artists based interventions, working with communities through things like visual arts, through storytelling, oral history, through painting, through dance as a different way if you like to interpret and tease out people's meanings and relationships with their environment.