Carbon on your street

Project lead: Samuel Booth 

In collaboration with Nottingham City council, estimates of carbon stored in vegetation and soils across the city will be mapped, with results displayed online and via a Physical Augmented Relief Model. Estimates will come from sampling of larger green spaces, with these estimates expanded to residential areas mapped via citizen science co-production. 

Amplifying voices: transforming digital maternity care for underserved women  

Project lead: Catrin Evans, Gemma Poole 

Digital tools can provide vital support during pregnancy. However, digital maternity care remains unexplored for underserved communities. By amplifying their voices and experiences, we aim to understand the digital pregnancy journeys of ethnically minoritized women to help bridge the gap in health disparities and contribute to research on digital connection.

i-Emerge

Project Lead: Aislinn Bergin

How can Emerging Technologies help people to live happier and healthier lives? Not many people get the chance to try Emerging Technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence, so our project is about bringing them to the people of Nottingham to help us answer this important question.

Photographing The Meadows  

Project lead: Mark Rawlinson  

This collaborative project with Make it Easy Lab supports two new photographers to make work that documents and engages with the Meadows and its communities. Building on practical and historical education, the photographers will seek out the uncommon or unconventional to produce woks which offer new perspectives on the Meadows.

Further Details

Hot in the city: mapping urban heat vulnerability hotspots  

Project lead: Simon Gosling 

This project brings together digital and geographical research by the University to create immersive 3D maps that help towards creating a living and working environment for Nottingham’s population that is better equipped to deal with the extreme heat we are already starting to experience due to climate change. 

“Inside out”: eating and embodiment in Nottingham through participatory photography 

Project lead:  Tamsin Parnell, Heike Bartel 

This project uses participatory photography to explore how young people encounter food and the body in Nottingham. Collaborating with Photovoice and local mental health charities, young people will gain the digital skills to represent their experiences and co-design a visual map of shared experiences that transcends linguistic and cultural boundaries. 

Youth stories of food futures  

Project lead: Anne Touboulic 

The voices of young people are seldom heard when it comes to imagining food systems of the future, yet their input is critical. This project engages young people across greater Nottingham around the issue of "Nottingham Food Futures". Working in collaboration with Nottingham Youth Climate Assembly (NYCA), we will invite young people in and around the city to share pictures and videos of their experiences and relationship to food as well of their visions for a just food future in the city. 

Co-creating a new vision for Nottingham as creative city  

Project leads: Helen Kennedy, Sarah Martindale, Cassie Brummitt, Kieran Foster, Richard Ramchurn, Paul Tennent 

This project brings together expertise in immersive technology, immersive experience evaluation and broader understandings of the immersive experience economy in a collaboration with local artists, arts organisations and cultural institutions to co-create a new vision for the city to promote better visibility and stimulate investment for an emergent cluster of innovative research and practice 

Exploring data through Art 

Project leads: James Parkinson, Jasper Donelan 

Working with City Arts and two local artists, we will experiment with different ways of telling  data stories. This project follows on from our data sketching workshops held in summer 2023. We are as much interested in the process of combining data and art as we are in the creative outputs themselves, which in this instance will be displayed at the University's Castle Meadow Campus. Employing their medium of choice, both artists will work from the same dataset, which records air quality in Nottingham (nitrogen dioxide levels) as measured by dozens of sensors around the city. Through this project, we will be asking various questions: what does pollution in Nottingham look like? how can art be used to engage people with data? how do different types of artistic representation influence the way people consume and understand data? what connections can we make between art, data, and place? 

Street User Interface of the Nottingham 3D Mesh

Project leads: Donal McNally, Cath Harvey, David Large, Glyn Lawson

This project will implement a pilot pedestrian ‘street user’ interface for the high-definition 3D mesh of Nottingham city centre. This will transform the application of the mesh from a single drone’s eye view of the city to a person centred, VR experience that can be shared by any number of interacting users. Applications are limitless but might include: user evaluation of planned cycle route changes, virtual street art festivals, and flood evacuation simulation from residents’ homes.

Factors affecting food security status, nutrient intakes and health outcomes in Nottingham

Project lead: Simon Welham

Food insecurity, while evident for people in receipt of benefits, is increasing among those with incomes from work. Consequently, many are struggling to feed themselves and their families. Nutritional deficits derived from this pose significant health risks for those experiencing sporadic and overt food insecurity.

In a recent survey of Nottinghamshire we found many residents to be experiencing food insecurity alongside clear dietary deficiencies due to reliance on cheaper, less nutrient dense foods. We would like to use this data to indicate city areas of particular concern, identify potential challenges to food access and potentially mechanisms for their alleviation.