The Fair Tracing Project

A quiet moment during the workshop

Fair Tracing principle investigator Dr Apurba Kundu attended the Impact! Exhibition Particpant Workshop hosted in London by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) on 1 December 2009. A brief video of the day is available at http://vimeo.com/9126124

Unfortunately, Nicolas Myers, the designer working with Fair Tracing on the Impact! Exhibition, was unable to attend due to illness. However, he did submit his initial thoughts on how he would represent an aspect of the project.

While the text is available on the Impact! Exhibition social network site at http://impact-art.ning.com/, the visual presentation remains private at this time. Suffice to say that the project management team is very impressed with his take on our research, and very much looks forward to assisting Nicolas in any way we can to realise this work for the Impact! Exhibition to be held from 16-21 March 2010 at the Royal College of Art, London.

The Fair Tracing project has been selected from among thousands of EPSRC grants to be included in the EPSRC Impact! Exhibition that will take place at the Royal College of Art, London from 16-21 March 2010. As stated in communications from EPSRC:

Engineering and physical sciences research has huge impact on the economy, on public policy, on culture, and on our everyday lives.  However, the value of scientific research is not always communicated effectively to the general public – and often it can seem abstract or complex.

To communicate the impact of the research we fund, EPSRC is working with NESTA [National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts] and the Department of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art [RCA], to co-ordinate a mixed media exhibition of original design proposals which explore the relationship between science and society, looking at the different types of impact engineering and the physical sciences have on the world.

[The RCA and EPSRC] compiled a shortlist of projects from the entire EPSRC remit (thousands of grants), of about 30 projects. The designers were then offered this list and chose the one that interested them the most. The designers will be exploring the possible social, political, economic, cultural and ethical implications of the research.

The primary audience [at the Impact! Exhibition] will be the general public, but also the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, other government departments, Ministers, business leaders and others… EPSRC will also use the Impact! Exhibition as a resource for producing print and online material which will ensure we can communicate the impacts of your research to an even wider audience.

Left-right: Nicolas Myers, Dr Dorothea Kleine, Dr Ann Light, Dr Apurba Kundu

Three members of the Fair Tracing management team met with designer Nicolas Myers in October to discuss our project in depth. Nicolas, who graduated from the Design Interactions course of the RCA, also has an MA in graphic design from the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and a degree in computer science from the Pierre & Marie Curie University, Paris.

Nicolas Myers’s work, greatly influenced by his studies in graphic design and computer sciences, investigates the implications of digital technology through the filter of design. In a context where almost all physical objects, living organisms and phenomena are described in a digital manner his projects question the neutrality of these representations, while focusing on aesthetic and visual representations and interactive experiences.

We are next scheduled to attend an Impact! Exhibition full day workshop in London on 1 December with members from the other selected projects and their designers. It promises to be a most interesting day!