Response to Vince Cable speech
On 8 September 2010 Vince Cable – Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills – gave a speech about the future funding of Science, Research and Innovation.
Read the full speech here
We welcome Vince Cable’s comment that both the arts and science have intrinsic merit, that we need a wide spectrum of research activity and that innovation is a key source of future growth for emerging economies.
Cable attributes the success of Professor Bhattacharya’s centre at Warwick to innovation produced by lateral thinking between different disciplines. Cross discipline research is again cited as fertile breeding ground for innovation in his mention that Alzheimer’s needs people working across biology, medicine, biochemistry and social science. It is not just the sciences that can contribute to innovation. Innovation within the creative industries can also result in social and economic value in unexpected ways.
We know from our Making Value report that graduates from craft subjects contribute to a huge range of industries including the more obvious, i.e. interior design, retail, performing, visual arts, but also craft skills have relevance in science. Three strong examples are Professor Paul Chamberlain, Dr Jane Harris and Dr Jayne Wallace.
Professor Paul Chamberlain is Head of the Art and Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University and Director of Lab4Living, an interdisciplinary research initiative at the University. A graduate from the Furniture School at the Royal College of Art, he was co-founder of London based FLUX Design Ltd. Chamberlain’s interest in people’s interaction with makers’ work has transformed lives, in the form of a medical connector device developed with Braun and in collaboration with psychologists at the University of Leeds. Working within an interdisciplinary team Chamberlain adopted a user-centred approach. Essentially his understanding of the dynamic between people and objects was crucial to the development of a design that met user needs. The patent for the ‘non-Luer connector’ design concept has been filed.
Dr Jane Harris was Reader and Director of the Textiles Futures Research Centre during her tenure at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Dr Harris works in the digital world of virtual reality environments exploring the presence of aesthetic design of fashion, textiles and the human form in digital spaces. She sees the potential of computer graphic imaging (CGI) as immense: ‘an extensive palette of tools’ and is one of the few people to come to the CG sector from a materials background. Harris established a consultancy within the Centre to ‘upvalue’ what textiles are perceived to be and how they can be embedded in science, architecture, fashion and whatever contributes to wellbeing. Textiles ‘cover every surface of our lives’ and the fabrication process to everything includes a textiles element, so the potential of engagements is huge. Most recently in talks with Gucci about ‘Sustainable Technology for Future Luxury’ Dr Harris is also currently engaged with the biotechnology sector. Dr Harris’ work was supported by Vicon, National Endowment for Technology, Science and the Arts (NESTA) Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Central Saint Martins.
Dr Jayne Wallace is a digital jeweller who works from the Digital Hub at Newcastle University – a cross-disciplinary research centre that explores how digital technology can enrich people’s lives. Digital Hub provides an environment for academics and practitioners from engineers to artists to work beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and work as a collective utilising everybody’s specialist skills. Dr Wallace worked recently with the Alzheimer’s Society to work on a body of work of jewellery that used radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to release sounds to prompt memories in Alzheimer’s sufferers. RFID technology is not a new digital technology but this application perhaps makes the case for technology at the hands of makers bringing a new dimension to scientific research.
It is imperative that practitioners from the creative industries are included in the “new, unknown, bright people” that are to be encouraged to continue to push forward, research and innovate.
