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Crucible Network for Research in Interdisciplinary Design

Crucible is a research network that originated in the University of Cambridge, and has become the largest organization in the world dedicated to promoting rigorous research collaboration between technologists and researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AH&SS). The main focus of this collaboration is on design as a meeting point for widely differing research disciplines. Crucible activities include the establishment of new research programmes, training of researchers, input to policy bodies, and identification of suitable funding sources for research in interdisciplinary design. Crucible provides both a scientific and organisational framework for this research.

Why the name? The crucible has always been a melting pot for valuable materials, the origin of new alloys, materials of innovation. We believe that the post-industrial crucible must be a place for melting and blending valuable knowledge and ideas.

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Crucible Network Members

One of the long term goals of Crucible is to support the creation of a national network of researchers and educators having shared interests. The focus of this network is on collaboration between technologists and arts, humanities and social science researchers, leading to reflective research in interdisciplinary design.

Crucible coordination activities are currently carried out by Alan Blackwell (Computer Laboratory), David Good (Social and Developmental Psychology) and Nathan Crilly (Engineering Design Centre).

Core members of the Crucible team in the past have been Rachel Hewson, James Leach and Lee Wilson

Full list of participants in Crucible activities can be found on the page

Events and Programmes

• Interdisciplinary design debates and seminars: http://talks.cam.ac.uk/show/index/6013
• HCI theory group
• Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy
• Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts
• Subversion, Conversion and Development
• Cambridge Festival of Interactive Technology
• Humanities in the European Research Area
• Evidence of Value: ICT in Arts and Humanities

Research Projects

Crucible is a network, not an institute. Our approach has been to establish, facilitate and maintain collaboration between academics whose expertise can contribute to the goal of interdisciplinary design research. This has resulted in a matrix of connections: diverse projects, each structured in accordance with the skills and experience of the researchers involved, and a broad range of researchers both inside and outside the University. Crucible involvement has ranged from direct management of local teams to coordination and advisory input on large national and international initiatives. Projects to date include:

• Energy use visualisation

• Reactive materials in public art

• Taxonomic inference

• Computational aesthetics

• Sketching as a design practice

• Patterns of user experience

• Programming as craft

• Technology for mental health

• business value of social networking

• FrontlineSMS:Radio

• Design for humanitarian relief

• Visualisations for Collaborative Work

• groups in academia

• Untraditional Folk

• Architectural views of information retrieval

• Culture, Communication and Change

• Cambridge Digital Humanities Initiative

• Bridging the Global Digital Divide

• talks.cam

• ReadYourMeter.org

• Coded Chimera

• Human participants in technology research

• Flagship Retrofit

• Improcess

• Age and Meaning

• Making mobiles tangible

• Artefacts of Encounter

• New Century Cities

• Design in Science

• Strategy roadmaps

• Choreographic Language Agent

• Museums of the future

• Undergraduate research

• Across Design

• Interdisciplinarity and Innovation.

• Virtual Violins

• Work Meets Life

• AmbITion

• Distributed working

• Choreography and Cognition

• Gender in open source

• Maschinist Hopkins

• Social Property and New Social Forms

• Virtuosity in computer use

• Conversation support for dementia

• Web usage in local government

• New Technology Arts Fellowships

• Distributed design studio

• From creators and critics to communities

• Web content on small screens

• Returning to online locations

• New ICTs, civil society and bottom-up governance in the developing world is an inaugural research project of a multi-disciplinary Centre of Governance and Human Rights in Cambridge.

• Investigating agency and intent in the experience of designed interaction, taking perspectives from psychiatry, consumer research and artificial intelligence.

• Educational applications of physically-embedded computing to the world wide web, as a member of the European WEBKIT project;

• The World Health Organisation is working with Crucible members to improve local response to outbreaks of new viral diseases such as Ebola. The challenge is to integrate field workers into a global research community, while empowering them to customise procedures and technical infrastructure to local conditions.

• Aptivate (previously Aidworld), a charity working with computer science and humanitarian relief and development specialists, building software for ultra-low bandwidth Internet access in developing countries

• Performance interfaces, notations and live music programming. Laptop music performers (Nick Collins), music technology developers (Chris Nash) and electro-acoustic composers (Alejandro Viñao) are working on the boundary of computer science and the music, with the Centre for Music and Science.

• What happens when paper charts disappear from a hospital ward? The intensive care unit at Papworth Hospital implemented a fully digital bedside record system, under the gaze of a variety of social scientists and information systems experts. The results led to publications in both clinical medicine and technology research, contributing to future best practice.

• Computational drug discovery;

• Development of socially-aware computing technologies for use in a fine arts context by multimedia artist Alexa Wright;

• Investigating the conditions in the built environment that lead to innovation communities, using a novel approach to Architectural ethnography;

• Human factors and evaluation methodology for Dasher, a hands-free text entry sytem

• As participants in the EPSRC Creator cluster, Crucible members are investigating New Research Processes and Business Models for the Creative Industries.