In December 2017, Creative Fuse funded 31 collaborative Innovation Pilot projects. These projects awarded seed funding of up to £5,000 or £25,000 to artists, freelancers, SMEs and cultural organisations from across the region who teamed up with academics and proposed groundbreaking new projects.

The Innovation Pilot projects range across a variety of themes, from health and wellbeing, to digital heritage and smart data innovation. What they each have in common is the creative fusion of ideas, skills and expertise across different sectors.

List of Innovation Pilots by Theme

Building Social Change

•          Democratising Creative Processes in Theatre Using Digital Tools

A project to develop and test digital tools within a young people’s theatre project, exploring how digital participation can be democratic and creating means of reaching new audiences.

•          SkillsMatch for Asylum Seekers & Refugees

This project will explore the viability of a skills-matching website, pairing asylum seekers and refugees with community volunteering opportunities which specifically correspond to their specific interests and skills sets.

•          The Middlesbrough Settlement

A project aiming to re-purpose the 19^th Century model of The Settlement, creating Settlement Houses that provide community skills development to drive social regeneration. These will be designed alongside the residents – not from those disconnected from the area.

CDIT, Health and Wellbeing

•          Cybercrime: Public Awareness & Behaviour

This project responds to cybercrime challenges identified in collaboration with Northumbria Police, with a series of hack events to brainstorm ways of raising public awareness about cyber security and improving public understanding of digital policing practices and processes.

•          iCoda-Health

This project aims to develop a novel digital arts-therapy product, drawing on the expertise of health care professionals to develop a sound-responsive image app. This will have the potential to calm children’s fears before surgery or stimulate memories for those living with dementia.

•          Interactive Storytelling for Patient Education (Bariatric Surgery)

This project will prototype an Interactive System Platform for patient education. A mobile app with engaging visuals and gamification will be produced to help communicate information easily, in a way that can be personalised and encourages user interaction.

•          Noise Reduction Choir

A project testing the effects of inclusive, improvisational singing on stress reduction and enhancement of wellbeing, led by Noizechoir, an experimental choir that perform without musical notation or words.

•          Resilience & Authentic Leadership for Entrepreneurs

This project aims to create a scalable framework of support for entrepreneurs and innovators. A programme will be designed consisting of mentoring, an entrepreneurial clinic, and an online community platform showcasing pathways to emotional resilience and wellbeing.

•          Youseum

Youseum aims to capture people’s reminiscences around treasured objects in an interesting and accessible way. The app enables people to record and attach words, video, images and web-links to online representations of their objects and share them with others.

Digital Heritage

•          Bowes North Digital Creativity

This project will explore opportunities for digital creativity and participation at the Bowes Museum, including virtual exhibitions, programming activity, downloadable content, emerging technologies and 3D artefact scanning.

•          Deep Learning for the Classification & Clustering of Museum Collections

This project applies Deep Learning to the digital identification, classification and clustering of museum collections to determine whether image object recognition technology can be used for crime prevention and protection against illicit trafficking in antiquities and cultural property.

•          Heritage Hunter Gatherer

Heritage Hunter Gatherer aims to create a first stage demonstrator of a digitally-enabled, multi-sensory visitor experience system for heritage sites and attractions, boosting engagement and enhancing learning by allowing visitors to scroll back and forth through history.

•          Valuing Digital Archives: Digital Archive Initiative

This project aims to set up a forum for mutual exchange between researchers and Cultural Heritage organisations, considering communication and cultural barriers that hinder fusion, and exploring how technologies can be usefully applied in the context of cultural heritage.

Digital (R)evolution

•          #NECultureisDigital

This project identifies synergies between case studies of three cultural organisations (large scale, small scale and festival) to deepen understandings around the potential of ‘digital’ for these organisations and test co-design between cultural, academic and digital thinkers.

•          Digital Evaluation Toolkit for the Creative Industries

This project will pilot a digital evaluation toolkit for arts organisations wanting to assess the impact of arts activity on participants, exploring the potential of developing an app that could be modified by organisations and developing an analysis framework around the data generated.

•          GearBuddy: Exploring the Sharing Economy in the Construction Sector

GearBuddy will produce a business case for a digital platform which facilitates equipment sharing within the construction sector. An Internet of Things (IoT) device will be developed to monitor construction equipment usage patterns, testing this within a trial construction site.

•          NEone Creative: Driving Freelancer Fusion

NEOne Creative was developed in response to the challenges identified for freelancers in the Creative Fuse Initial report. The project aims to develop a digital platform designed to lead to face-to-face collaboration between freelancers and larger organisations, and other freelancers.

•          Tees Valley Cultural Alumni

This project will address how digital platforms can enable arts organisations to re-imagine their clients as “alumni”, to retain contact, cultivate relationships, and to better understand and demonstrate the impact of culture in communities.

•          Virtual Resolution

This project is a fusion between the digital and legal sectors. Due to the commercially sensitive nature of the project, more details will be published as the project gets underway.

Future Cities

•          Green Places

This project will create an app allowing users to search for information about their local green spaces, helping them to find locations suitable for their desired use, whilst gathering important data on the use of green spaces for helping to improve environmental, social and economic health.

•          Passive Management of Building Environment Systems Using Phase Change Materials (PCM)

This project combines blown metal structures with Phase Change Materials (PCM), substances capable of storing and releasing heat energy. The project will research these artworks’ potential to thermally manage the built environment, creating energy-efficient architectural solutions.

Immersive Innovation

•          Adabee: An Augmented Reality & Cloud Based e-Learning Kit for Inspiring Youth Uptake of Coding & Making Skills

AdaBee is a new generation classroom pet and educational kit aimed at inspiring 9 to 12-year-olds to engage with coding and making. The project will create an interactive device that can be disassembled and expanded, providing an interdisciplinary use of AR, Cloud and IoT technologies.

•          Applying Digital Technologies to Create New Ways of Designing, Manufacturing & Selling Clothing

This project aims to create a new digital platform, enabling design and showcasing of clothing products using 3D design tools, advanced manufacturing tools, and the use of virtual and augmented reality.

•          Augmented Reality for the Sight Impaired

This project will develop an Augmented Reality application for visually impaired people. Using accessible washrooms as the setting for this proof of concept pilot, the app will use the principles of AR to help the visually impaired safely navigate unfamiliar spaces.

•          Exploring the Relevance of Immersive Technologies for Housing, Health & Social Care

This project will identify opportunities for immersive technologies to be used with the business operations of a local integrated housing, health and social care organisation. Digital SMEs will be invited to respond to a challenge brief based on the opportunities identified.

•          The View from There

Envisioned as the first steps within a multi-channel cultural innovation project, ‘The View From There’ will invite participants to come together around the potential of immersive technologies to enhance participation and connect cultural experience directly to societal challenges.

Smart Data Innovation

•          Automated Aerial Crop Inspection

This project will apply machine-learning techniques to enable real-time identification of crop problems captured by drone. The anticipated output will be a proof-of-concept demonstrator application, capable of identifying potential problems in real time.

•          Shoes2Run

This project combines wearable technologies and Artificial Intelligence for the sports and healthcare sectors with the overall aim of promoting personal health and wellbeing, assessing and monitoring an individual’s gait analysis across a number of sports, diagnostics and rehabilitation.

•          Smart Sensory Spaces

The project will generate an exemplar sensory map within the North East, raising awareness about how people with ASC (Autistic Spectrum Condition) experience the city. It would suggest methods for modifying the built environment to improve the day-to-day experiences of people with ASC.

•          Sunderland Data Labs

This project addresses critical infrastructure issues and difficulties in the city associated with wayfinding, impacting on commercial businesses. Creatively gathering and using data, the project will create new assets to be used by a range of community and business audiences.

•          Word Nerds

This project will use Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing techniques to improve automated machine understanding of product/service performance using open data sources. By analysing the language used by the public online, this project will turn a mass of raw data into actionable insights which can be benchmarked against competitors.