Pervasive Media Fellowship

Professor Jonathan Dovey of the University of the West of England will run two projects in partnership with the Pervasive Media Studio, a new media innovation environment launched by Watershed Media Centre in Feb 2008. The Fellowship will bring academic research methods to the Studio network in order to build a long term, cumulative and sustainable knowledge base into its work. The Fellowship will ask two questions. What is Pervasive Media? As the rhetoric of new technologies promise us ever more connected worlds, an 'internet of things', the established channels of media production, dissemination and reception are being slowly reformulated. The utopian rhetoric of Ubiquitous Computing would argue that we are at a new frontier. These developments need critical attention ; the method here will be to look at a number of case studies in self defined 'Pervasive Media' applications to establish and begin to define the common core of practices, aesthetics and experiences. The research will advance the development of a new sector of creative industry by helping to create a common language for media professionals, members of the public, commissioners, brands, clients, and funding bodies to understand what Pervasive Media are. The second question addressed by the Fellowship is what is value in digital media ? Digtial media has created an age of media plenty from the era of analogue scarcity - the existing patterns of political economy are being gradually destabilised. Two major technology trends are reshaping the creative industries: Web 2.0 has created a rapid growth of User Generated Content (UGC) which is changing the way content is made and delivered; networked and context-aware channels promise to change the way content is accessed and consumed. The Fellowship will bring academic research methods in the political economy of the media to bear on cultural industry case studies to produce knowledge about how the new generation of web native creatives are creating sustainable value models. These findings will in turn be disseminated through publication, workshops and new training events in order to advance the development of Pervasive Media sector.

- Local impact: This Fellowship is designed from its inception to have a direct impact on the partner by answering research needs that have arisen in its first year of operation. Namely how can we help people to understand what Pervasive Media are and how can creative teams working in the Studio better understand the kinds of potential value that their work creates ?

- Economic impact: In the future the delivery of media content over the network will not be restricted to computer screens. It is argued that the number of 'consumer' devices connected to the network will be thousands of times greater than the number of 'computers'. In this 'Internet of Things' networked objects and spaces will enable context-aware services capable of tailoring content delivery to the situation. We call the delivery of media in this way Pervasive Media (PM). The ingredients for the growth of this market are: the availability of sensors from which to detect context; a large population of consumers; authors with expertise in context-based delivery of content; and effective business models through which to monetise value. This fellowship will impact on the development of this market by working with the the first research lab in the UK dedicated to the field in order to a) support the growth of a market by making descriptive languages available which help designers and consumers understand the potential applications of Pervasive Media and b) capturing through case study analysis and dissemination the emergence of effective business models. This impact will be underpinned by theoretical research into how new understandings of commercial and public 'value' derived from eg media ecologies analysis can be applied to developing markets in such a way as to create creative and commercial opportunities across diverse sectors such as heritage, transport, health, and arts as well as advertising and retail.

- This impact will be measurable at the end of the research by a substantial increase in the number of Pervasive Media Studio residents and researchers who are able to move on from the 'ideas lab' to sustainable enterprises in the media economy. It will also be measurable through the impact that the two summer schools for new media producers has in increasing the number of skilled business managers available to work with 'creatives' to develop their work in new media markets. The Studio has had two successful SMEs grow out of its environment in its first year; the Fellowship will aim to double this number. There is currently no training available for producers in the field; the Fellowship's impact could also be measured through the training of 20 media workers in the process of funding and managing pervasive media applications. The metrics made available through the Urchin software ( see Technical Appendix) will also provide us with statistics on the frequency of use of the research resources made available online as part of the project.