Digital Economy Research Centre

Digital Economy
Research Centre
D E R C

DERC
This is the
Digital Economy
Research Centre

Contents:
Welcome
Overview
DERC in Numbers
Local Democracy:
Citizen Participation & Tech
Public Health & Social Care:
Creating New Resources
Participatory Media:
Telling New Stories
Education:
Next-Generation Technology
Centre for Digital Citizens
Acknowledgements
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DERC
Welcome:
The EPSRC funded Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC)
began in 2015, initiated by Patrick Olivier and Pete Wright, and
has engaged a huge number of researchers across Newcastle and
Northumbria universities.
The footprint of DERC has been enormous. From this one large
project we have produced dozens of smaller projects, supported
the careers of over 80 researchers (from early-career to more
seasoned academics) and through the engagements themselves
connected with tens of thousands of members of the public
(across the region and internationally).
Our collaborative work has pioneered new models of ‘digital
civics’ research, connecting and embedding academic research
within community groups, third sector organisations, charities,
local government and industry. Through this we’ve explored new
ways of empowering communities and engaging citizens in the
digital economy.
Following the success of DERC we have launched our EPSRC
Next Stage Digital Economy Centre for Digital Citizens. We are
taking the core themes investigated within DERC and are using
that knowledge to foster further digital social innovations with
communities. In doing this we are continuing our journey to
change discourses from a focus on ‘smart cities’ to supporting
smart(er) citizens, in urban, rural and coastal places.
Professor David Kirk
Professor Abigail Durrant
Co-Directors, Open Lab

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DERC
Overview:
The Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC) aimed to design,
develop, and evaluate new digitally-mediated models of citizen
participation and civic engagement. To do this DERC worked with
communities, the third sector, local government and industry
partners to co-design and develop future local service provision
and local democratic processes.
Within this broad framing the main research themes of DERC
have focused on supporting digitally-enabled citizens in areas
such as local democracy, urban planning, public health, social
care and education, and we have explored new civic media and
participatory platforms to support this.
Going into the DERC programme the overarching challenges of
digital exclusion, local authority austerity, civic disengagement
and changing political landscapes were pressing. Alongside this
however were emerging opportunities around open and
citizen-generated data and a renewed will for greater
community empowerment.
To address these challenges and opportunities DERC
researchers needed to develop a variety of novel (co-design led)

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research methods, and digital tools and technologies that are
participatory, action-oriented, and embedded in, and responsive
to, real world contexts. Through the research partnerships and
long-term research collaborations we have developed we have
been able to transfer knowledge and insight to various
communities of need.
Critical to the centre’s mission has been our engagement with the
local civic bodies such as Newcastle City, Gateshead and
Northumberland County Councils, embedding our work in the
North East of England. But our work has also been translated into
a number of international humanitarian contexts, giving us a
distinctively global reach.
DERC’s extensive program of research, knowledge exchange and
public engagement activities have drawn on a broad range of
academic expertise spanning Computer Science, Design,
Business & Economics, Behavioural Sciences, Urban Planning,
Education, Statistics, Social Gerontology, Public Health and
Social Care, and delivered interdisciplinary insight and impact
across these areas, exploring the role of digital technologies
in civic life.

DERC in numbers:
Project Team:
DERC was led by 35
interdisciplinary academic
investigators
From 2 universities: Newcastle
University & Northumbria
University
With 20+ community, industry
& third-sector partners
Funding:
£4,051,357
(EPSRC)
+ £4m matched funding
(Universities & Partners)
November 2015 – December 2021

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Outcomes:
100+
publications
80+
researchers funded during the grant
14869+
minutes of LLARC podcasts listened to
300+
delegates from 60 National Societies
took on our escape room
3,000
people gave their views on Newcastle's Parks
26,000+
responses through MetroFutures
12,000+
registered users of FeedFinder
38,000+
people used AppMovement to develop
27 new mobile apps

DERC
Local Democracy:
Citizen Participation & Tech

DERC
MetroFutures: Shaping the new
Tyne and Wear Metro
The Tyne and Wear Metro train fleet has served the UK’s busiest
light rail network outside London for over 40 years. In 2016,
Nexus, the public body running the publicly owned Tyne and
Wear Metro, applied for the funds to replace the trains and
commissioned a public consultation to understand what people
across the region wanted from their new trains.
They approached Open Lab to help run the consultation, and
rather than relying on methods such as questionnaires and
surveys, MetroFutures used pop up Labs in shopping centres
and busy public spaces across the North East, co-design
workshops with co-researchers (members of the public), and
tools such as the Open Lab built JigsAudio - a consultation
method that uses talking and drawing.
The design for the new trains was based on the concerns and
ideas from the over 3,000 people who took part in the 2016
consultation.

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In 2020, after Stadler’s proposed designs were received, Nexus
asked Open Lab to run another public consultation to find
whether the new design fitted public needs and help decide on
interior design options. It was delivered using interactive online
platforms, through social media and augmented virtual reality
workshops.
The 2020 consultation received an unprecedented 23,000 public
responses, and was called “one of the most far-reaching public
consultations the global rail industry has seen.”
MetroFutures won the Technical Innovation of the Year - Rolling
Stock award at the Global Light Rail Awards.
Publication:
Metro Futures: Experience-Centred
Co-Design at Scale
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2020
DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376885

DERC
Publication:
Infrastructuring public service
transformation: Creating
collaborative spaces between
communities and institutions
through HCI research
ACM Transactions on
Computer-Human Interaction 2019
DOI: 10.1145/3310284

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Let's Talk Parks
Let’s Talk Parks was a project between Open Lab and Newcastle
City Council to design a public engagement and consultation
programme to involve local people and multiple stakeholders
contribute meaningfully to the decision-making processes on
how the city’s parks should be managed in the future.
The project engaged over 3,000 people working with Newcastle
City Council to re-envision and re-shape Newcastle’s public
parks service using multiple channels of engagement.
Let’s Talk Parks' workshops invited residents, allotment holders,
the business community, local volunteer groups, park managers
and rangers, and other interested parties to work as a team
using a bespoke board game-style process to share values and
then consider different scenarios and bring their ideas together
into a collective response.
In addition, weekly hour-long debates on Twitter provided
opportunities to discuss options and engage with dynamic polls
around alternative futures for Newcastle’s parks. The Let’s Talk
Parks website acted as a repository for ideas and a platform for
further discussion.
Research generated through Let’s Talk Parks informed the
requirements for a new public park service in the city of
Newcastle Upon Tyne. The research also demonstrates the value
of participatory processes that are able to productively connect
citizens and public institutions.
Photo by Valiphotos from Pexels

DERC
Open Lab: Athens
Open Lab Athens started as a project within DERC, aiming at
engaging with self-organised Social Solidarity Movements in
Greece to design and develop digital technologies for cooperative
service provision and solidarity economies. This initial work
established Open Lab Athens as one of the key actors of the Social
Solidarity Economy and resulted in the publication of several
influential academic publications in Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work and Participatory and value-centered design.
Open Lab Athens is now established as a not-for-profit, digital
civics research and technology development lab. The last three
years, Open Lab Athens has been successful in participating in
EU research projects and currently employing four full-time
researchers, developers and designers.
Example projects include:
The H2020 Generative Commons Living Labs project aiming to
create a platform to bring together and support formal groups
and informal communities of citizens who manage fab-lab,
hubs, incubators, co-creation spaces, social centres created in
regenerated urban voids. Open Lab Athens specifically focused on
bringing together digital tools that promote citizens’ participation
and community building.

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The H2020 CO3 project studying the potential benefits and risks
of new digital disruptive technologies to co-create, co-produce
and co-manage public services along with citizens.
The Erasmus+ project SEEDS, aiming at developing socio-digital
technologies (e.g. chatbots combined with social processes) in
collaboration with social workers, cultural mediators and school
teachers.
An EU preliminary action on Smart Local Administrators started
in October 2021.
Publication:
HCI, Solidarity Movements and the
Solidarity Economy
ACM Transactions on Computer-
Human Interaction 2017
DOI: 10.1145/3025453.3025490

DERC
Publication:
Streets for People: Engaging
Children in Placemaking Through a
Socio-technical Process
ACM Transactions on
Computer-Human Interaction 2018
DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173901

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Streets for People
In 2014, Newcastle City Council set up the Streets for People
project to identify where streets could be made more peoplefriendly
by reducing car traffic, improving walking and cycling
infrastructure and improving the public realm. Open Lab
designed tools and processes to engage children in the project,
and presented their ideas in a Town Hall to members of the local
authority.
The children went on neighbourhood walks and were
encouraged to use their senses to explore current problems and
future changes that could be made to the streets. As part of this
project Open Lab built Make Place - an open-source, online
geographical survey tool for asking questions and displaying
these answers on a map, which children used to share their
ideas. Beyond Streets for People, Make Place has been used by
Newcastle City Council to connect people wanting to volunteer
their time to support the wide range of established community
organisations during COVID-19, to connect volunteers with
community needs in Lebanon, and more.
From this project came Sense Explorers – a toolkit of
participatory workshops that use the five senses and some
digital sensing tools to investigate air quality, noise pollution
and traffic speeds. Sense Explorers has involved over 200
children from Newcastle and beyond.
Streets for People won Best Paper at ACM Transactions on
Computer-Human Interaction conference 2018.

DERC

Public Health and Social Care:
Creating New Resources

DERC
Intake24:
A 24-hour dietary recall system
Intake24 is a free multilingual online dietary capture and
analysis tool built by Newcastle University that provides the
same quality of data as interview-led dietary recall at a
significantly lower cost. Based on the multiple-pass 24-hour
recall method, the system enables participants to input all food
and drink consumed, estimate portion size using visual guides,
and review their input at each stage. The system has been designed
to ask a series of prompt questions if food or drink items
are considered missing, such as “did you have any butter on your
toast?”
Intake24 automatically links to the food composition data and
the weight of the food from the chosen portion size to calculate
the nutritional output.
It was piloted as part of the Scottish Health Survey (SHeS) in
2018, was selected and adopted as the first ever digital dietary
assessment method for the UK National Diet and Nutrition
Survey (NDNS) Rolling Programme and expanded with a South
Asian food database and adapted for offline deployment in the
South Asian Biobank to support field studies in developing
regions with no Internet access.
Photo credit: ucw.org/mediakit

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The adoption of Intake24 into the UK NDNS and South Asian
Biobank offline deployment was instrumental to Australian, New
Zealand and Fijian reviews and decisions to select Intake24 for
their national nutrition surveys.
Across the international research community, the Intake24
system has to-date been used in at least 158 individual research
studies funded by Institutions, Charities, Research Councils and
Governments around the world. The software has been used by
tens of thousands of research participants across 15 countries.
Publication:
Comparison of INTAKE24 (an Online
24-h Dietary Recall Tool) with
Interviewer-Led 24-h Recall in 11–24
Year-Old
2016 – Nutrients
DOI: 10.3390/NU8060358

DERC
FeedFinder:
Finding breastfeeding friendly
places across the world
Across Britain, one in ten women choose not to breastfeed due
to fear of breastfeeding in public. Open Lab designed a free
mobile app called FeedFinder that aims to support breastfeeding
women by helping them find breastfeeding-friendly places in
their community.
Women can use FeedFinder to search for and view places on the
map where other women have previously breastfed, and
contribute their own experiences of a new or existing venue.
It was designed and developed in collaboration with 30 new
mothers across the North East, and the review criteria in the app
is carefully crafted to meet women’s breastfeeding needs:
comfort, hygiene, privacy and baby facilities.
Publication:
FeedFinder: A Location-Mapping
Mobile Application for Breastfeeding
Women
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2015
DOI: 10.1145/2702123.2702328

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• Feedfinder has been featured on Sky News, BBC News, the
Journal and the Metro.
• Since its launch FeedFinder has had over 12,000 registered
users, and 5,000 reviewed and rated venues.
• FeedFinder was awarded a Digital Economy Social Impact
award from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council (EPSRC).

DERC
ThinkActive: keeping fit using
low-cost technology
ThinkActive is a system to encourage primary aged school
children to reflect on their own personal activity data in the
classroom. Open Lab worked with two primary schools in the
North East alongside the Newcastle United Match Fit
programme located in the west end of Newcastle, which is in the
top 5% of the most deprived areas in the UK.
ThinkActive uses inexpensive activity trackers and
pseudonymised avatars to encourage children to get fit. The
teacher is given a collection of activity trackers, and each
student is assigned a randomised avatar such as Blue Elephant 3
or Red Octopus 5. They update their step count by scanning their
personal QR code onto a ThinkActive hub.
The children compete in teams, but can choose whether they
reveal their identity to their friends or the rest of the group. This
allows them to compete, but not feel pressured or stigmatised
if they don’t have as many steps as someone else. Their data is
anonymized on collection to safeguard the children, and prevent
potential stigma or bullying.
ThinkActive won second place for Tech Innovation for the
Future in the T3.com awards.

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Publication:
ThinkActive: Designing for
pseudonymous activity tracking in
the classroom
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2018
DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173581

DERC
Publication:
Ticket to talk: Supporting
conversation between young people
and people with dementia through
digital media
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2018
DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173949

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Ticket to Talk and DemYouth:
supporting families living
through dementia
An estimated 800,000 people in the UK have dementia and many
of them come into regular contact with young people at home
or in care homes. Through the project DemYouth, working with
fourteen young people aged between 16 and 24 with personal
experiences of dementia, Open Lab and researchers at
Newcastle University created the app Ticket to Talk.
Ticket to Talk is a smartphone application designed to
encourage conversation between younger people and
grandparents, close friends or people they care for who are
experiencing dementia. The app works by enabling family
members and friends to collect digital media in the form of
sounds, pictures and videos relevant to a particular period in
their family member’s life (or ‘tickets’) that can be used to help
support conversations and remembering with those they are
close to with dementia.

DERC
LLARC: Later Life Audio &
Radio Cooperative
The Later Life Audio and Radio Cooperative (LLARC) is an
award-winning initiative to promote radio content produced
by older adults. The cooperative seeks to respond to ageism in
broadcasting by increasing the representation and engagement
of older adults in radio and audio production. Providing
opportunities for older adults’ voices to be heard is especially
relevant given current age-related debates about COVID-19.
LLARC was inspired by research from Newcastle University
which looked into the efforts of older adults already creating
community radio shows right across the UK. Through this
research, the research found a diversity of approaches to
creating community radio - all sharing the same passion for
broadcasting in later life.
LLARC is made up of several community radio stations,
organisations and people from across the country, including
Newcastle University, Older Voices, the Elder’s Council, Sonder
Radio, Age Speaks, Radio Tyneside, and more.
LLARC received the Stirling Prize at the British Gerontology
annual conference in 2020 with their interactive poster about
the project.
The project was awarded one of Newcastle University’s
Engagement and Place awards in the category of ‘access and
participation’ and received funding from Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Telling Tales of
Engagement.

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Publication:
Content Creation in Later Life:
Reconsidering Older Adults' Digital
Participation and Inclusion
CSCW 2020
DOI: 0.1145/3434166

DERC
Publication:
Speeching: Mobile Crowdsourced
Speech Assessment to Support Self-
Monitoring and Management for
People with Parkinson's
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2016
DOI: 10.1145/2858036.2858321

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Speeching: crowdsourced
speech assessment for people
with Parkinson’s
Speeching is a mobile application designed by Open Lab that
uses crowdsourcing to support the self-monitoring and
management of speech and voice issues for people with
Parkinson’s.
The system comprises a smartphone application that allows
individuals to practice a series of speech tasks and to upload
these to a remote server. The recordings are then rated by
crowd workers for ease of listening, speaking rate, pitch
variability and volume. These ratings are then fed back to
participants in order to provide therapeutic targets to support
home practice of Speech and Language Therapy tasks.
They demonstrated that anonymous crowd workers, recruited
opportunistically via an online crowdsourcing platform could
provide equivalent ratings on impaired speech to that of an
expert.
Applications like Speeching open up new opportunities for
self-monitoring in digital health and wellbeing, and provide a
means for those without regular access to clinical
assessment services to practice and get meaningful feedback on
their speech.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

DERC

Participatory Media:
Telling New Stories

DERC
App Movement:
Enabling anyone, anywhere to
create their own apps
App Movement is an online platform designed by Open Lab that
enables communities to propose and promote ideas for mobile
applications in response to community needs. The community
can collaboratively design the app through a series of customisable
features, and automate the development and deployment of
a customised app.
App Movement was launched in February 2015 and now has over
38,000 users who have created over 233 movements and
automatically generated 27 mobile applications to support
communities to find dementia friendly places, gender neutral
toilets, drone flying locations, and more.
Through the App Movement platform, citizens take a proactive
and independent approach to identify their own issues and
develop technologies to support their communities.

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Publication:
App Movement: A Platform for
Community Commissioning of
Mobile Applications
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2016

DERC
OurStory:
Participatory video that can be
used by anyone
OurStory is a mobile application and workflow developed by
Open Lab in collaboration with the International Federation of
Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) to gather
participatory feedback on their projects.
Often participatory video using a professional film crew does not
produce authentic videos from the community and comes at a
heavy cost. However, with the OurStory app and workflow it can
be done by the community themselves using low-cost phones
and tablets.
Publication:
Our Story: Addressing Challenges
in Development Contexts for
Sustainable Participatory Video
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2019
DOI: 10.1145/3290605.3300667

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This allows the stories to be richer, and led by the community,
giving them full control over the content in the videos. The app
was also designed to work in areas with low-connectivity or no
internet.
The IFRC used has Our Story on several projects such as a
water sanitation and hygiene promotion project (WASH) in
Tumbit Melayu, Indonesia and a HIV/AIDS Orphan and
Vulnerable Children’s project in Otjozondjupa region, Namibia.
The stories collected from all the IFRC projects were planned,
collected, directed and edited by men, women, elderly and
young people.
The videos created by the communities fed into the monitoring
and evaluations used by the IFRC, and the community’s voice
and their stories directly influenced IFRC programming in the
future.
Our Story is continuing to be used as an inexpensive and
self-sustainable model for IFRC programming.

DERC
WhatFutures:
Engaging youth volunteers
using WhatsApp
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies were
looking for a unique way to engage their youth volunteers in the
planning for their Strategy 2030.
WhatFutures is a real-time game event designed by Open Lab
played entirely through WhatsApp, which engaged over 4,000
volunteers, who shared over 80,000 messages, between 421
teams across 120 countries.
Split into small teams, players were given creative challenges
to produce media and newspaper headlines around potential
challenges facing them in 2030, which was fed into the IFRC’s
Strategy 2030.
WhatFutures was nominated for an international Digital
Communications Award as an example of innovative internal
communication.
The project was mentioned in the ‘Our Futures: By the people,
for the people’ Nesta report as an example of collaborative
futures.

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Publication:
WhatFutures: Designing Large-Scale
Engagements on WhatsApp
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2019
DOI: 10.1145/3290605.3300389

DERC
Immersive humanitarian
escape room: Disseminating
strategy in a new way
After working on WhatFutures, the IFRC asked with us to come
up with a unique and immersive way to disseminate their
Strategy 2030 at their General Assembly held in 2019.
Open Lab built the first ever immersive 360-degree
humanitarian escape room experience based around the five
major challenges facing the IFRC over the next ten years from
migration to climate change.
Delegates were shown an imagined future where the strategy
hasn’t been implemented, they were then asked to solve a
series of puzzles and ‘re-write history’ before it was too late. The
escape experience took around 30 minutes, and the room was
designed to use five digital projectors to achieve full 360-degree
projection, as well as a suite of stage lights to set ambience and
immersion.
Over 300 delegates from 60 National Societies took on the
escape room at the International Red Cross General Assembly in
Geneva.
The immersive escape room - Escape to the Future - was
nominated in the DigiLeaders 100 list for Cross-Sector Digital
Collaboration of the Year and the Games for Change award in
the Best XR for Change category.

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DERC
Publication:
Scaffolding Community
Documentary Film Making Using
Commissioning Templates
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2016
DOI: 10.1145/2858036.2858102

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Bootlegger:
Citizen filmmaking app
Bootlegger is an app developed by Open Lab for real-time
collaborative video shooting and editing that allows different
people who have attended an event, e.g. a concert, to upload
their footages, collect others’, and edit them into a single video.
Bootlegger bridges the gap between professional filmmakers
and people with no prior filming experience wishing to record
video on their mobile phone. Bootlegger makes it easy to capture
multiple views of a place or topic, different stages of an event, or
synchronised shots from people distributed around the world.
• Bootlegger projects include Loudest Whisper – a project to
dispel the myths surrounding Stockton following the Benefits
Street series. The project saw local people create and
contribute their own footage and take part in editing the
clips to show their own story.
• Berwick-upon-Tweed’s neighbourhood planning group used
Bootlegger to film the local area with the intention of raising
awareness of the work of the group and using the footage in
future consultations.
• Bootlegger has been used in multiple digital civics research
areas, ranging from education to neighbourhood planning
and consultation projects such as MetroFutures.
Photo by veeterzy from Pexels

DERC
Spkr:
Examining the echo chamber
via a smart home device
Motivated by the effects of the filter bubble and echo chamber
phenomena on social media, Northumbria University developed
a smart home device, Spkr, that unpredictably “pushes”
sociopolitical discussion topics into the home.
The device utilised trending Twitter discussions, categorised by
their sociopolitical alignment, to present people with a
purposefully assorted range of viewpoints. We deployed Spkr
in 10 homes for 28 days with a diverse range of participants and
interviewed them about their experiences.
Our results show that Spkr presents a novel means of combating
selective exposure to socio-political issues, providing
participants with identifiably diverse viewpoints. Moreover,
Spkr acted as a conversational prompt for discussion within the
home, initiating collective processes and engaging those who
would not often be involved in political discussions.
They demonstrate how smart home assistants can be used as a
catalyst for provocation by altering and pluralising political
discussions within households.

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Publication:
Broadening Exposure to
Socio-Political Opinions via a Pushy
Smart Home Device
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2020
DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376774

DERC

Education:
Next-Generation Technology

DERC
Publication:
Designing IoT Resources to Support
Outdoor Play for Children
ACM Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems 2020
DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376302

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Playing Out with IoT:
encouraging outdoor play
Playing Out with IoT is an innovative ESPRC-funded research
project exploring how Internet of Things (IoT) technologies can
be developed and extended to enable children under 9 years old
to create digital outside play in their own neighbourhoods from
Northumbria University. The project responds to concerns that
fewer and fewer children are playing outdoors, which is having
an impact on health, wellbeing, personal and social
development.
Playing Out created a range of resources such as Instructables
that allowed children and parents to create and use some of the
IoT play inventions. They aimed to make the work as accessible
as possible by using off-the-shelf IoT devices alongside their
own kits and guides that make use of freely available materials.
Activities included Light Painting with the BBC micro:bit,
building IoT Lanterns and Hackathons.

DERC
SOLE meets MOOC:
Self-organised learning with a
social mission
SOLE meets MOOC is an online learning activity for would-be
social innovators and activists. The research was inspired and
motivated by the example of SOLEs (self-organised learning
environments) and builds upon the experiences of early
connectivist MOOCs (massive open online courses). Open Lab
delivered three pilot courses on the topic of Sustainable
Development, in partnership with United World Colleges
putting a focus on civic engagement and the autonomy of
student learners throughout the course.
Over a period of 12 months following the courses, evidence
emerged of at least 24 instances of student involvement in
activist endeavours. The secondary effect was that many of the
projects were promoted outside of the direct online classroom
and involved the creation of outside learning communities.
Photo credit: ucw.org/mediakit

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Publication:
SOLE meets MOOC: Designing
Infrastructure for Online
Self-organised Learning with a
Social Mission
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM
Conference on Designing Interactive
Systems
DOI: 10.1145/2901790.2901848

DERC
OurPlace: an app for
interacting with outdoor
spaces
OurPlace is an app designed by Open Lab to allow anyone to
create, share and complete fun learning activities in outdoor
spaces. Offering a wide number of interactions such as
photography, video, audio recording, map marking, drawing
and location hunting, the app makes it easy to create playful and
creative learning activities.
The app, which started its life as ParkLearn, helps people learn
while out and about and provides follow up tasks for in the
classroom.
Publication:
We are the Greatest Showmen:
Configuring a Framework for
Project-Based Mobile Learning
Proceedings of the 2020 ACM
Conference on Designing Interactive
Systems
DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376650

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Anyone can create their own fun activity from any combination
of interactions and tasks. Hunt down a secret location, make
video diaries or draw over a photo to point out interesting
features - all directly through the app.
Schools, youth councils and heritage organisations have all used
OurPlace to explore the places that matter the most to them -
whether it is a local park, a beach or a historic neighbourhood.
By using the app, people of all ages can see places in a new light
and put these findings to use in lots of exciting ways.

DERC
As the Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC) draws to a
close, we aim to use what we have learned and to expand on
these research themes for our Centre for Digital Citizens.
The Centre for Digital Citizens (CDC) is an EPSRC Next Stage
Digital Economy centre addressing the emerging challenges of
digital citizenship.
The CDC will take an inclusive, participatory approach to the
design and evaluation of new technologies and services that
support ‘smart’, ‘data-rich’ living in urban, rural and coastal
communities.
Core to the Centre’s work will be the incubation of sustainable
‘Digital Social Innovations’ (DSI) that will ensure digital
technologies support diverse communities and will have
long-lasting social value and impact beyond the life of the
Centre.
Both Newcastle and Northumbria have expertise in participatory
design and co-creative research, allowing us to work with
people to deliver these technologies and create new innovations
for the Digital Economy that empower citizens.

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The Centre for Digital Citizens’ pilot projects will be spread
across the urban, rural and coastal geography of the North East
of England, embedded in communities with diverse
socio-economic profiles and needs.
You can find out more about the Centre at:
digitalcitizens.uk
Or email the centre manager Effie Le Moignan at:
effie.le-moignan@newcastle.ac.uk with any questions or to
become involved with the CDC.

DERC
Acknowledgements:
Principal Investigators:
David Kirk / Patrick Olivier / Peter Wright /
Co-Investigators:
A Adamson / M Balaam / T Bartindale / P Briggs / K Brittain / R Comber /
L Corner / C Crivellaro / E Foster / T Gross / Y Guan / B Hanratty / P James /
A Kharrufa / S Lawson / P Missier / S Mitra / K Montague / K Morrissey /
T Ploetz / F Sniehotta / M Tewdwr-Jones / L Todd / A Van Moorsel / G Vigar /
J Vines / V Vlachokyriakos / C Walker-Gleaves / P Watson / D Wilkinson /
R Wilson / D Zizzo /
Researchers:
S Abaci / D Al-Shahrabi / R Anderson / S Armouch / C Bone-Dodds / S Bowen /
A Bowyer / L Carvalho / D Chatting / E Christoforou / M Christou / C Claisse /
S Concannon / K Court / A den Hoed / A Dow / T Feltwell / S Fischer / F Galston
/ A Garbett / S Gkeka / E Hwang / P Jarusriboonchai / E Jenkins / I Johnson /
E Kampouraki / O Katsoulis / G Kazamias / A Koupepia / K Ladha / D Lambton-
Howard / E Le Moignan / T Lee / S Lewis / J Liddle / K Long / Y Long / T Lowe
/ M Martin / A McCarthy / R McNaney / L Michie / T Nappey / C Naranwala
Gonaduwage / L Nathan / P Nikolettou / T Osadchiy / I Panagiotopoulou /
I Poliakov / J Rainey / M Shakeri / E Simpson / R Talhouk / R Thompson /
D Varghese / L Vidalis / S Wang / D Welsh / G Wilkinson / A Wilson / G Wood /
R Wood / J Worth / J Zhao /
Professional Services:
E Barker / S Bellwood / S Cavanagh / A Coates / N Francis / F Hay / S Islam /
J McCoul / D Parry / R Pattinson / A Schubert / M Sleightholm / P Wilson /
L Woodward /

59
DERC Formal Partner Organisations:
Newcastle University, UK (Lead Research Organisation) / Northumbria
University / Technology Strategy Board, UK (Co-funder) / Society of IT
Management (Project Partner) / Arup Group Ltd, UK (Project Partner) / Royal
Town Planning Institute, UK (Project Partner) / Orange Labs, France (Project
Partner) / Microsoft, UK (Project Partner) / Tunstall Healthcare (UK) Ltd
(Project Partner) / Gateshead Council (Project Partner) / British Broadcasting
Corporation - BBC, UK (Project Partner) / Arjuna Technologies Ltd (Project
Partner) / Ordnance Survey, UK (Project Partner) / Northumberland County
Council, UK (Project Partner) / Newcastle City Council, UK (Project Partner)
/ Promethean Ltd (Project Partner) / Reflective Thinking (Project Partner) /
VocalEyes Digital Democracy (Project Partner) / Voluntary Organisations'
Network NE (Project Partner) / Skype Communications SARL (Project Partner)
/ cloudBuy (Project Partner) / Assoc Directors of Adult Social Service (Project
Partner) / NHS Newcastle West CCG (Project Partner) / Red Hat Labs, UK
(Project Partner)
Thank you to all of the community groups, charities and collaborators we've worked
with over the last six years.
Booklet designed by: Daniel Parry & Emily Barker

2021
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