Host City 2022 Glasgow

Some thoughts ahead of #HostCity2022 next week.

"COVID has brought about a step change in audience expectations, which must be seen in the context of a longer history of making our live and remote experiences increasingly immersive, flexible, and technologically enabled. The Web2 era nurtured this desire and COVID embedded the expectation, readying us for web3.

For sure, the error we make is concluding that this is a move away from the importance of physical space as a crucial component of a compelling experience, but what's changing is the capacity to level up the physical world with immersive integrations which have been prototyped during COVID. Audiences expect to be more active and the data driven event economy finds a crucial extension through volumetric and locative audience data.

The future of the elite event experience is phygital - e.g watching digital content layered over a physical swimming pool and seeing the projection of Olympic swimmers live into the space, as it happens, or the transition of triathlons into arena based virtual worlds, or running in your gym alongside athletes as they compete. These are our clues which shed light onto the future and it's as big a shift as was the design of the amphitheatre in ancient Greece.

In this context, rights holders need to massively rethink what they do and what they are in relation to their audience. Simply staging something isn't enough anymore. The Olympic Channel is a great example of how institutions are experimenting to find their feet in a world where the media proposition around events is vastly different. The MVP in this future is to wrangle the innovation community that can remake events for a vastly different set of audience expectations."

Join us for Host City in Glasgow next week!

Life in the Metaverse #BeingHuman2022

On 16th November, we’re hosting an event for the AHRC Being Human Festival, giving people a chance to step into the metaverse and explore the world in virtual reality.

ESPORTS at New Scientist Live

“If you liked what you heard at NSL, then follow these accounts to get involved.” Prof @andymiah

Re-Imagining STEM, 30 years on

I’m really pleased to have published an article in the print and online version of the Times Higher Education, inquiring into the relevance of the STEM acronym, 30 years after it was coined. I’ve worked across many subjects and taught in science and art schools.

What I’ve learned is that the divisions between subjects leave us absent of the kind of holistic world view we need to take us to a future we can really embrace as being the best of humanity. This article discusses the loss that has ensued from a STEMinist mentality in our knowledge systems, while also considering that the underlying vision has led to an impoverished appreciation for what it could have been and meant. Even within the natural sciences, divisions between subjects are rigid in the main part, as researchers are pushed into ever greater competition for resources and this works to our detriment.

Here’s the LINK to the article.

The Cyborg Today

Last month, I was delighted to speak at the cyborg conference, led by Profs Monika Michałowska, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska. The proceedings are now published and free to download and it’s a wonderful insight into what’s been happening in cyborg theory over the last 20 years. Take a look and update your ideas about what the cyborg is in our present times

Download the full proceedings HERE.

And here is MY CHAPTER

The Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games

The Beijing 2022 Games take place this month and you can catch all of my content over at Culture @ the Olympics with summaries on this dedicated page .

COP26 - What we did

Over the COP26 fortnight, I hosted A LOT of online live sessions for the University of Salford. We brought expertise from around the university

Climate Exp0 #COP26

I was absolutely honoured to host a series of conversations during the world’s first Climate Exp0, an event orgnanized through the COP26 Universities Network. I was even more proud to co-host it with Anna-Maria White, a student in Salford University’s Wildlife and Practical Conservation programme.

We’ve been working on a few more COP26 related projects, which I’ll post about soon, but here’s a glimpse into what happened. find out more at this dedicated page.

What Clubhouse tells us about the future of social media

Delighted to be interviewed by Fortune magazine writer Jonathan Vanian on what Clubhouse means for our future in social media. Audio communities are doing incredibly well at the moment, signalling a desire for retreating from video into the less intense, more intimate space of sound. The full article is behind a pay wall, but here’s the link.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games

Unfortunately, I was not able to go to Tokyo, due to covid, but this didn’t stop me making a heap of content about what took place. Find all of it over at my Tokyo 2020 page.

TEDx University of Salford

Well this was an absolutely phenomenal event! Over 1500 households registered for the event and you can watch back my presentation on the TEDx platform here.

The ethics of virtual sports

I've really fallen behind on updating my website, so I'm going to blitz through the last 3 months!

Way back in March, I gave a talk for the doctoral school of the University of Lausanne about ethics and xr sports. It was a great way to think through some new ideas and you can find the entire session here.

Will Artificial Intelligence Kill the Drama in Sports?

A talk for the Global Alliance for Responsible AI

COVID-19 and Public Communication

As part of the Scottish Parliament evidence session, my contribution focused on how we evaluate government communications during the pandemic. It’s a notoriously difficult subject, as there are so many moving pieces. However, there really ought to be some way to reflect on the effectiveness of the communications strategies and to establish comparators across nations.

The final report from the Scottish Parliament session covers a lot of levers for Scotland’s recovery and you can read the full scope of these here

The Hyperquantified Athlete

A few weeks ago, I was interviewed for an article in the Washington Post, written by Nick Busca, who does fantastic work writing about new technology. You can access the article here (hopefully!)

Global Sports Week

Global Sports Week took place last week, led out of Paris, France. I gave a Masterclass on Esports and, while so much was online, a huge amount of activity tool place. Here’s a bit about how it felt.

COVID-19 and the Scottish Parliament

I was really honoured to be part of a session organized by the Scottish Parliament to advise the Scottish Government on their public communication strategy. The session was a really good opportunity to think about how we evaluate government communications, especially in times of urgent need for clear messaging and quick public reactions. I hope this may develop into some further research on the subject and may well need some international collaborators to get it done.

LDNUTD Education Programme

I was really honoured to take part in the inaugural esports education programme hosted by LDNUTD, a fantastic esports team in London. Reaching out to young esports players in London, the sessions covered all aspects of becoming an esports professional. I was really pleased to speak to school kids and beyond about how to think through developing a public speaking presence in the esports world. Here’s a bit of what we covered.

Brave New World Festival

I was delighted to speak about Extraterrestrial Ethics this month for #BNW2020, a fantastic event, which brought together artists, philosophers, scientists, and engineers to think through some of the biggest problems we face.

My talk on ET Ethics gets into an expanded definition of alien life forms that takes into account the new biology we are creating through synthetic biology and the likelihood that our evolution may take place outside of planet Earth!

More on that later!

Esports Education Summit

Earlier this month, the British Esports Association produced the Esports Education Summit, in partnership with Pearson Education. I was delighted to speak in a session with Dr Maria Stukoff, as host.

We covered career paths in esports, from how STEM subjects are really benefitting from the esports pathway to the creative work involved in designing increasingly immersive experiences in esports.