good afternoon everyone thanks for joining us so to check you're in the right place we're going to be talking about design and technology in this session you may or may not know that fairly recently the government have announced the creative Industries as one of five key growth areas for the UK and specifically out of that they're wanting to grow creative clusters across the UK adding 50 billion gva so that's a positive the other thing that's just happened in the last week is that the department for culture media and Sport have released a creative Industries sector vision that is also leaning in on how important this sector is to give you a couple of stats from 2020 sorry 2010 to 2019 the creative Industries grew more than one and a half times faster than the wider economy in 2021 the creative Industries generated 108 billion in economic value employing about 2.3 million people and that was a 49 increase on 2011. so this growing full of potential sector so that's what we're going to be talking about to introduce myself I'm minimal I'm the chief executive of the design Council why are we leading on this because design is at the heart of it and design and Technology together really really powerful area and Powerful growth area so we have a panel who are going to be able to dig into this before I introduce them at one little bit of glossary I think you will probably know what AI is artificial intelligence to just for anyone who doesn't know what x r is it will be referred to XR is extended reality so an umbrella term for virtual reality augmented reality mixed reality Etc so you'll certainly hear XR and if there's other things that sound rather complicated hopefully people will explain so let me introduce who we have on the panel on my left we have Lord Clement Jones Lord Clement Jones is the liberal Democrat um House of Lords spokesperson for science Innovation and technology and he's the former chair of the House of Lords select committee on AI and the co-chair of the all parliamentary group on or party parliamentary group on AI amongst other things I am delighted that he's also an ambassador for acid which is anti-copying in design Asha on my right Asher Eastern is the immerse immerse UK lead at innovate UK KTN so immerse UK is the UK's National Innovation Network for immersive and metaverse technology and innovate UK KTN work to grow immersive Tech in the UK Ash is also an original member of the London chapter of women in immersive Tech and she's co-founder of the XR diversity initiative and an EDI advisor to Europe's first metaverse fund over on the far right is Damien Damien Murphy is Professor in Sound and Music Computing at the Audio Lab in the school of physics engineering and Technology here at the University of York and he is director of XR stories which supports research and development for companies that are working at The Cutting Edge on digital technology here in Yorkshire and the Humber side so three experts on tech let's start off Asha can you just talk to about where we are now and what the opportunity is in this sector yeah and I'm going to speak from the XR lenses as you mentioned um and you know we write this immersive economy report every year with immerse UK that kind of looks at kind of the national uh ecosystem and where it's at and the last one that we published showed you know significant growth in the sector two of the big kind of uh you know overall trends that we noticed were helping to grow the space um the covet actually accelerated the advancement of Technology quite a lot and so did the does everyone who's heard about the metaverse just out of curiosity yeah you've heard yeah meta changing their face changing their names meta um the metaverse doesn't exist yet we can probably get into that maybe a little bit later it would require the convergence of a number of different Technologies including immersive Technologies kind of like a core component of that um but that whole Trend really um which has now been overtaken by by AI uh you know really helped to boost things as well but overall you know we have a really strong Innovation ecosystem in the UK just generally you know through innovate UK and research and development grant funding that exists through the work of innovate UK KTN which is our larger parent organization that works to Foster innovation cross-sector in the country and the work that we've done around around immersive it's all it's all working like very well and works very strongly um and you know overall we've just seen you know much bigger Trends in the space it growing a lot private Investments at the highest levels that's ever been in 2021 when we from the last report that we wrote um and you know not on an international level because we're kind of like the window into the the national ecosystem abroad people come to us often to kind of work in the UK or extend their businesses here and we find that the UK creatives are seen globally as some of the best in the world and you know really Best in Class for creating immersive experiences um for everyone anyone who doesn't know about like the film festivals around the world like Venice can South by Southwest all these massive International festivals where immersive work is shown and judged UK UK companies are there on mass they are always some of the best ones they're winning all the time and really we have some of the a really amazing reputation internationally around a creative immersive work so I think it's very strong wrong and there are at also I'll pass the Damian to be able to talk a bit more about like regionally why we're very strong as well around extra Innovation because he led one of the creative clusters um in New York that that had some funding to to boost the ecosystem here specifically and I think that it's all very strong that we have these Regional hubs that are also you know founded yep perfect it's a good segue today yeah indeed good link thank you um so uh Ashley's laid out sort of you know the the opportunity and how good the UK is is it doing this and in fact I remember something from um the inaugural immerse UK student awards only a month or so ago um it was sponsored by some of the key businesses in the UK and they were saying as part of that that um it's definitely the case that if a student or a member of their staff has worked on a on a project creative immersive technology related project it's a door opener internationally in terms of the the perception of the skills base and the talent that the UK has and how desirable that is to companies is all over the world so um yes I work at the University of York and we were on one of the creative clusters um that are currently one of the nine creative clusters around the UK and that have been um highlighted as one of the the key areas of success over the last five years to support the creative Industries and one of the areas of focus for the government's creative sector vision for the next 10 years about investing that same model of activity for Creative Industries businesses in six new areas around the country so what does exile stories do it supports innovation in film television and games across the whole breadth of Yorkshire so York obviously we know is in North Yorkshire but we spread our influence across West Yorkshire South Yorkshire and also to homicide and over the last four and a half years we've run more than 200 projects and these are typically projects that could be placing an intern into a creative Industries company we want to explore something new in using XR technology well the example that we did for instance is that is putting someone working on on interactive narratives in the Leeds piano Festival of all things and and it was a huge new area for the least piano Festival to explore and a huge new area of technology for this individual to explore so we've run more than 200 projects ranging from very small like that to very large with global media companies we um have leveraged 20 million of co-investment into the region based on the the funding that we Supply to companies across Yorkshire and Humber we've increased revenue for our companies in the region by about six million pounds we've created and maintained more than 500 jobs and this is all based out of York and the University of York working across our region and we have a very diverse cluster but it's all bound together by understanding that there's great talent across Yorkshire in film TV and games technology so that's what we've been doing for the last four and a half years and we're about to start also that was launched in the sectivision this week on a project called co-star and we're one of four National Labs that are going to be installed around the UK to support info structure to support the creative Industries in particular creative screen Industries and live performance Industries and so this is a partnership led by the University of York and production Park which is an amazing Europe's largest Live Events technology campus which is just outside of Wakefield you've probably never heard of it before but I guarantee that the industry has heard of it because that's where people like Beyonce Coldplay Lady Gaga the Arctic Monkeys that's where they go and rehearse when they're in Europe and so they're a brilliant brilliant company that are problem solvers and designers about how around stagecraft and technology and Logistics about how you get these wonderful wonderful Productions out onto the road and transported around the world ultimately so we're going to be working with them over the next six years and we're going to put an r d lab in their creative campus so we bring together the University of York's work wakefield's reputation at production Park in this area and then supported by the creative Industries in our region of Yorkshire and Humber and lead what the future is going to be doing in with one thing right um to production we talk about XR or virtual reality or augmented reality experiences all of this is underpinned by games technology because all of those experiences are built on games engines the two biggest ones being unreal and unity just because we'll probably mention it a few times and I think that's really really important and one of the other really important sort of foundations of this particularly more so in the future will be how ai ai is going to change this whole creative sector ultimately another brilliant segue thank you Damien Tim over to you with with the AI lens you know again what's what's the opportunity well it's really interesting isn't it because um uh here we are talking about all the opportunities of AI and I know we're going to come to the challenges later um but one of the issues is the it's been framed at the moment in a rather kind of uh existential threat way um uh and yet uh the three of us I would say pretty optimistic about uh what AI can deliver provided we get the the get the framework and the guard rails right I think uh AI uh interestingly over the last few months with the release of a number of different forms of AI and after all it is extremely varied but this is generative AI you know the chat GPT dally stability diffusion which allow an individual this isn't just a great big corporate uh operation anymore you know it isn't just a question of being able to afford these large AI systems which is how many people were thinking about it up to quite recently but with open ai's chat GPT in particular this is now in the hands of individuals to a much greater extent and that's true of the things like dally the image creation and stability diffusion as well so it does give an opportunity for designers to brainstorm if you like using uh these kinds of tools and that's what they are you know I don't think the thing is to get too worried about the existential threat at this stage if uh they're used for the right purpose and as creative tools and certainly in the whole XR area and I love the way that we now seamlessly move from xrar VR you know everything's got an initial uh user interface a UI user experience ux you know you've got to develop a whole new bunch of uh jargon basically to actually penet trade some of this some of this world but I I am optimistic uh but the big issue is uh who actually owns a lot of these big engines and uh what's the access to them at the moment uh it's open access uh open source and that's really useful what we don't appear to be able to do and this is why the government's putting money into what are called exit compute uh computers and Quantum Computing and so on and we don't have the big data sets which are needed to to operate on those big computers to create our own uh generative AI models you know a lot of these are going to be in the hands of Silicon Valley so the question is going to be well how do these licenses operate what kind of data are they using are they actually taking people's ingesting if you like uh copyright material which they already have so we'll we'll come to that later but I'm essential actually optimistic and let's face it you know some of the movies we've seen of late using AI for special effects and so on uh has been amazing and uh as Asha says really an awful lot of this is fundamentally derived from the games industry and this is one thing I think a lot of people don't understand the games industry is bigger than every other industry in the creative industry is put together nowadays and that's where an awful lot and this is where you know XR stories and this is where uh Yorkshire if you like can really score to use a cricketing analogy where Yorkshire can really score in this whole field because that is the fundamental uh area that so much work is going on in the digital field and digital is what it's all about currently so this was something we were speaking about actually anyone been to the amazing Abba Abba Voyage um it's just extraordinary and and I'm not a highly technical person but you know when you go to something like that and experience this absolutely extraordinary thing you kind of go I don't care how the tech works that's incredible it's just an example so optimism money being invested government recognizing how important the creative Industries are real strength up here in the north Damon can we go back to you and just talk a little bit more about then if everything was kind of going to go well keeping optimistic what could we be looking at here in the north how good could this be if we the stars align okay it's a really good question so I think um there is already been significant investment in in supporting the creative Industries in our region and that is going to continue through this new co-star initiative and one should also say that there are other big Labs being invested in in Dundee and in Belfast as well as um a Royal Holloway just outside of London as well um and they reflect again some of the strengths around the UK as well as what we're doing here in Yorkshire I think um we need to know about it more I think here in the region you know um so it's often referred to production Park as the hidden Jewel in Yorkshire and the creative Industries in terms of what they do on a global scale and the reputation that they have um and and yet it's not known about and fundamental to their success and to the success of the creative Industries in general I would suggest is the skills in the area as well it's developing a skills pipeline that starts in school and goes all the way through to take a next generation of creatives all the way through so that they're ready for this industry or perhaps more importantly they're ready for the change that this industry is going to continue to accelerate through over the next 10 to 20 years so I think that's really really important and I think we again one of the other interesting aspects of production Park is they have a training academy on their site called The Academy well I know it's now called The Academy of live technology they've just changed the name and I had to check on that before we came and so so they're actually sort of investing in vocational training for the skills that are needed for the industry that is literally on their doorstep and so I think that's a really really important aspect of what they do and now taking that sort of vocational angle the industry work that's going on there and then thinking about how r d through the University of York sort of um uh connection can leverage their business further again be ready for the opportunities that come along further down the line is really really important but the skills piece is really important and I think going back to um maybe what a role that universities can have more generally in this aside from the great work they do in Science and Technology support and the r d that they offer it's also been able to take that longer view on the ethical implications around what is being done in this area thinking about the human aspect of what's been done in this area this comes back to design of course as well and we can talk about technology and we can talk about how this is driven by the big companies on the west coast of of America and elsewhere in the world but the human at the center of it is really really important because we need to design these Technologies these experiences these stories for people that want to have these stories and want to have these experiences there's no point just designing them for the sake of it because they're clever so ethics and design and the human are really really important I think it's something you know Yorkshire great storytellers I think we're great at doing that so so one thing I'll come back to in a bit but having not been to York for a while this extraordinary sort of juxtaposition of the Heritage the beautiful old kind of city in its history and and and also this absolutely Cutting Edge element as well and I think there is a really interest there's a job to be done on the perception of York just even just even focusing on York so I would agree I think you know uh York is not um a city like Manchester or these or Sheffield a post-industrial city where post-industrial spaces are transformed into sort of more creative technology focused spaces uh York does it slightly differently there's a great book written by a colleague of ours and city called Ben Porter about the creative spaces of York which really helps you understand where creativity takes place in the in the sen around the city which is I'd go and get that if you can recommended um but also you know I should probably give a shout out to my colleagues in history and history of art some of the greatest um uh technology of its time you can see in York Minster in the stained glass that's there that was you know the absolute artisanal and technological driver of of creativity and storytelling in Europe at a particular point in its history so York has always been there at The Cutting Edge of technology and history and storytelling and the future um but we do it slightly different from other people I think I just stay on ethics for a little bit and Tim come to you in a mode definitely because of the ethics around AI um Asha anything on you want to add in on on ethics around this whole thing oh wow well interestingly we um we've just started scoping some new working groups at immerse UK um that we want to have permanently operating around diversity inclusion accessibility of this technology for people specifically with disabilities ethics is another working group and another one on sustainability and I just I think that that topic is like it's a whole all those four topics and there's so many subtopics beneath them it's a can of worms there's so many things that still need to be addressed there's actually some you know great work being done kind of internationally as well like organizations like XR access for example that work on these kinds of topics um but yeah it's ethics is deep right it's uh is access to the technology it's which is an issue even just you know how we were talking about connectivity being like the base layer we don't even have connectivity at the level that we need across the entire country for everyone to have access to this technology that's an ethical problem and then thinking about you know globally Global access as well that's an issue um you know thinking about safeguarding for children in immersive spaces that's a really big deal tons of work being done around that we did a report with the IET around that a few years ago which has led to the I can never remember the acronym for this Child Protection Organization I think it's nccp they've caught I can't remember I'm so sorry but they've commissioned the researcher from that report to do more Deep dive look into what safeguarding really means in Virtual Worlds and how do we address that and they were trying to like do more future gazing of like what's to come but what's already been found is you know quite you know it's a little dark to be honest but um but we need to we need to find these things we need to address them and we need to think about you know access and and how different people operate in these spaces and yeah yeah it's a lot of work to be done yeah so Tim I know we've sort of touched on this but the ethics around AI in particular well it's really interesting isn't it I spent uh my life thinking about the implications of AI and it reaches into so many different areas I always say that AI has really given us the opportunity to in a sense rethink so many different areas are a whole approach to children's safety because of the algorithms online uh the whole approach to competition policy because of the access to uh high powered Computing and data sets uh the whole approach to corporate governance because of the way that AI can substitute for jobs you know each of these particular areas requires quite a bit of Regulation I'm afraid to say and it and it provides a challenge for politicians to actually understand what the implications are because you know you don't want to close down Innovation but regulations sometimes in my view can be the encouragement for Innovation uh you don't want to close down freedom of expression but on the other hand you've got to make sure that uh that uh that young people are protected and the illegal harms online don't flourish and so on so the ethics of AI in the broader sense are extremely important and then you need to start unpacking some of the other regulatory issues but but just for instance the use of AI you know we have to know uh in terms of intellectual property what is the source of of some of these data sets is it just move fast and break things and just uh rip off everybody's IP for instance uh particularly in the design field uh how transparent is the use of uh the AI system you know does it are people passing this off uh as other people's work or are they actually deliberately imitating somebody else's work is this effectively some sort of deep fake that they're not attributing to the artist or the Creator or the designer so uh there are you know a lot of different areas you know how responsible are people for the use of an AI you know now that these are in the hands of individuals not just uh you know corporates or government or whatever individuals will now have to understand well you know I need to own up if I'm using this to write my essay or whatever it is for the future or design something uh that is a rip-off of somebody else's so actually individual ethics are going to be important not just organizational ethics and you know this raises a lot of societal issues right across the board and I don't think that you know I'm not an uh you know an existential threat person but I do think that well in advance of what you call artificial general intelligence where you've got this kind of ability to operate autonomously in AI what we really have to do is start putting those guard rails around and understanding what we think is permissible what is very high risk and therefore needs proper guard rails and what we can accept as a as a day-to-day uh thing so to speak but you know if I have an individual designer I'm going to want to see some of these things but I would like to know uh right up front what I should be able to do what I shown uh I can't do and I also want to know well you know if I'm using these tools are they actually entitled to the IP that I'm developing and so on and so forth it's very interesting one final point that the there is now a minister combined Minister for AI and IP and I think that's a really really good development because it means that that Minister who you know I've got quite a lot of time for can actually have an overview of the impact of one or the other and I think that is it's a really important going forward I think it's really interesting like the rapid development of all of these Technologies simultaneously and how they're all starting to combine converge actually in different ways and it's so early so early days for that like the convergence of XR with AI and also um has anyone heard of blockchain technology web3 technology a little bit yeah um and that was actually a great benefit in the eyes exactly exactly exactly and it was like the hottest one of the hottest topics on the next tech stage at London Tech week this past week which is the convergence of all these Technologies and how yes and all these ethical concerns we're talking about some of them could potentially help the others with that so blockchain using blockchain technology for example to protect IP um and to make sure that artists and designers benefit from their work you know no matter whoever else uses it afterwards um and then in things like uh another ethical issue I didn't mention in XR but around data privacy and the um use especially if People's biometric data okay and this is something that's great concern to me I don't has anyone played beatsaber in VR before is this like game where you like chop blocks and there's music it's the biggest game in VR and there was a study that was that came out that was done in um uh where was it uh Berkeley I think it was and they basically found that like using beat saber for 10 minutes they can you they can literally uh take your body movements and they can identify you based off your gate with it with 90 like five percent accuracy of something like that and and I was okay well you know who's gonna how many people are actually gonna go in and play Beat saber for 10 minutes but actually they can do it with like 73 accuracy if you play for 10 seconds you know so that's a lot you know there's a lot of different things and I on the one hand that's a little scary but I I like to you know the positive flip side of that is also the you know using people's biometric data in order to use experiences for example for people with disabilities you could see it as an accessibility thing so it's like well how do we enable people to own their own data be able to toggle on and off which data gets used so maybe you turn on the eye tracking in an experience because you you're you can't move actually so you need to move through your experience using your eyes how do we how do we enable that kind of thing so I try to look at the positive side of it but yeah that's so I'm just wondering this is me paraphrasing on this but actually while all this incredible technological and Creative Design advances happening we do need people who are really trying to keep up and get ahead if possible on the guard rails whether that's policy or legislation exactly what it looks like we need that to be running in parallel fast but the fact we have a minister at least now with that remake is it and they've got they've got quite an agenda I mean the one thing I'd add to ashes is that of course now performing rights are in real trouble because if you can uh extract the biometric data effectively of somebody's performance they could be musician or an actor or whatever and Equity has got quite a big campaign on this AI can actually fake uh them forever so you can be um you can do Mission Impossible and rip it off completely you know Tom Hanks is uh a performance you know completely and you'd only need a license if you've got uh his Biometrics and you know the implications of that are huge they are huge he wanted to say something and then yeah I guess I was just going to go back to one of the points about about ethics actually and it's the um the inherent biases in the data sets that have been used to get to this point in in terms of where we are with with AI and and how the fundamentally not representative of our wider demographic in the world and and very focused on one thing and that means that you know if we want if we want an equitable and ethical future for this technology then we need to make sure that more people are involved in its creation and its consumption and also in in the data that we're using and and being you know more careful about and understanding what our data is and what we're letting go and and what we need to keep and keep private um but we do need a more Equitable landscape to train these models more effectively so that they're more representative of our society rather than focusing one particular aspect of it can I just add to that because I think that's absolutely right I think uh AI makes you think very much about the makeup of the tech Workforce if you like as well diversity is absolutely crucial if you're going to avoid the biases and the prejudices in a sense of the past but also it makes you think about well where is the reward for this going uh in societal terms it's another area where AI makes you think you know do we need some sort of universal benefit system to make up for the fact that AI may eventually substitute for quite a lot of jobs yeah let's it's really good when you're chairing to have the largest Bell going off as you're just fabulous it's like having a huge clock on your wrist so let's start bringing it in a bit regenerative regenerate um so we're speaking here in York about this exciting moment in time this technology this creativity um and how we can harness it and there's government taking it seriously so what Damian actually starting with you what are some of the barriers what are the things that are going to get in the way of us really making this work for the people the economy communities uh I think it goes back to one of the we've talked a lot about ethics we can probably never talk quite enough about it I think that's fundamentally important and also the more the we have these conversations the more people understand what this is about you know there is there is a great moment at the moment it seems about AI capturing the the the imagination of what this might mean and so it's starting to encourage people to have conversations and to understand some of the quite complex implications of what all of this means I think so that that's one thing it's definitely worth having continuing the conversation about I will go back to the um the skills aspect I think um you know it's important for us here in the city of York to understand what the opportunities are going to be for our young people as they come through and to understand that and you know we see this at my University at York St John at universities you know um elsewhere in our region that we want to build opportunities in our region we want to build opportunities in this area that we are you know World leading in so that people can be part of it rather than have to go somewhere else to be part of it or feel that they're not included in this conversation so I think that's really important and that's a you know a job that we have to do from in schools upwards and you know I give a shout out to our reach partnership which is one of the things that takes culture into schools in York and is working on that and is working with some of the businesses in our on our in in our city and to start again exploring these conversations and opportunities with um the future generation of creatives so that's really really important um skills is definitely going to make that that uh key part and also I think it's a little bit of a shift in again thinking about York and thinking about our region you know York and North Yorkshire is a rural region effectively you know and we're going to become a mayoral combined Authority and where York sits in that is quite interesting and important I think and we have an opportunity to influence and have an impact on our communities more widely between here and the coast and those creative communities and those creative artists and try and enable them to have access to this technology and access to these skills and new opportunities that are going to come along because we're not leads and we're not Sheffield and we're not Bradford who are very different sort of types of city and very metropolitan cities and there are stronger clusters of particular businesses there so I think we need to understand that and reflect that maintain those strong connections with our region but build opportunities for our next generation of creatives coming through and understand how that can have an impact more widely across our our more rural landscape so it's quite a big tall order I've set ourselves there but there we go it is and Azure and then Tim and then be thinking of questions I just want to jump in on the just for like the national and international perspective on this too like there are some interesting National reports that were done on the skills Gap by story Futures Academy on the skills Gap in the XR space skills Gap specifically in Virtual production space um and I think like just our country having actually done that and like doing that deep dive because it's very complex that skills Gap and how we fill it um the fact that we have that knowledge already that nationally the fact that a cluster like York already like this area already understands it is working on that that is that's very we're very far ahead you know um I think uh compared to other other places it's a good thing yeah that is good to hear Tim anything to add on this oh yeah uh sadly um quite a bit I mean on the skills Gap I'm afraid freedom of movement from Europe uh has made uh I think quite a big difference and we need to really uh think hard about a number of aspects of how we can improve our skills I don't think we're putting enough into the boot camps I don't think the apprenticeship Levy particularly for smaller businesses uh is good enough you know we need to do various root and Branch things and I I don't really understand why we haven't to date uh whether it's just a simple matter of lack of prioritization or a real unwillingness to change the apprenticeship uh Levy system but that for me is really important in the skills area and it's so important if you're going to have a cluster you've got to have the skills to develop it and grow it and and you know this is a fantastic story here in Yorkshire it really is and I understand the slight nervousness about they've got a combined Authority aspect because you don't want to get a sort of marginalized within a bigger structure but you know and I'm a big fan of Tracy Braven I work with her for a little bit and when she was in the Commons and I think she's a great you know to have a creative mayor I think is a great thing so uh yeah and it's not combining things isn't an unalloid uh uh uh uh benefit but on the other aspects reform of uh intellectual property we are nowhere near fit for purpose in terms of the way that our designers are protected uh uh uh if you write something as an author you've got far far greater protection than you have as a designer uh or or as an a a even as an artist you've got much better protection than you do as a designer and a designer it's rather like a kind of Victorian approach to a well they're in trade you know uh they they make they do designs for products you know whereas if you're an artist or a writer you have a whole you have copyright you can uh get somebody in the magistrates gut up in the magistrates Court you can't do that with unregistered designs there are all sorts of reasons why AI is a a real issue in this whole area of intellectual property as well so that all needs sorting out enforcement and the actual name of the game I I mentioned uh to you earlier I mean the Australian uh uh paper that they've just put out consultation paper about Ai and design rights in Australia and they they've given the example of an AI that can simply say well look just do perpetually designs based on this chair in a slightly different form and it produces thousands and thousands and thousands of different designs based on that chair and it means that effectively it's almost impossible for anybody to get any protection because all these designs even though they're never put into production are out there and when you do a search uh the the intellectual property officers I'm sorry uh it's already somebody's already done that it's not novel anymore so there are issues like that which are a real real problem which need dealing with and I think finally uh I think the whole network aspect is really important uh it's not just about the clustering it's about having networks uh and uh the power of of information across the networks as well um so I I would go for that I think the it may not be inevitably part of being a cluster that you have those networks but I do it requires quite a lot of effort for the people in a particular region to pull that together I mean we see how Network the network effect operates on social media so maybe Yorkshire needs its own uh social media to bring it all together do we have any questions yes the gentleman at the back with the with his hand up I'm a member of um multi-academy transfer trustee and in terms of learning in terms of schools and the praise behind the curve I think schools certainly are behind the code I was going to ask if you had or what thoughts you had about how we begin to prepare the Next Generation Um in terms of the curricula the sort of what they actually studying in schools and um Staffing and preparing the teaching course to make that provision which is clearly crucially important particularly I think because there's almost an inverted pyramid of knowledge now whereby the students are more likely to understand and what the current uh more about the technology than the current teaching courses yes where do we go we know we need to do something in education but can we be a little more specific about the sort of things that we actually need to do yeah a good question thanks Andy Asher start there what do we need to do gosh this is a personal opinion just on about like teaching kids generally and that it's these days and you're right they know more than potentially like the teacher who's teaching them on specific things I think there's something about teaching creative thinking and create critical thinking teaching kids to inspiring kids to learn to love learning as opposed to forcing them to do it specifically designed curriculum and knowing that because they're gonna need to change so many times as this stuff develops the the life of working in one job for 30 years doesn't exist anymore even for my generation you know people stay maybe five years in a job um and I think like having that level of fluidity and creativity is so important and that's a different type of education than what we currently do it's just sit and read something out of a book everybody do the same quiz like I don't know it's it's just it's a whole it's like holistically the whole education process probably needs to be looked at um and on the and teaching teachers I that's that's a big one and I'll just highlight up a program that story Futures Academy ran that was quite interesting called train the trainers and it was specifically to upskill Educators so that they could bring immersive technology into their classrooms and understand how to deploy it understand you know how to make a curriculum around it and that was a really interesting program but again that was part of a it was funded out of a program called audience audience of the future which is only 33 million pounds to basically help grow this the sector and again it was like one part of like a whole bunch of work that they did so there's something probably bigger around upskilling Educators and putting more funding towards that but yeah it's important Damien yes it's also fundamental about a shift in the curriculum and how and what's going on in our schools of course you know stem and stem and stem we always hear that and yes of course it's important but we shouldn't just be teaching the basics of physics and maths and biology of course that's fundamentally important but it's where they're applied which is really important as well and we need to make sure that the Arts and Humanities are fundamental to our education as well because without those then there's no balance and of course where does that take place it takes place more than anywhere that combination of Arts Humanities and stem in the creative sector and the creative Industries and so there's a huge huge opportunity there to really underline the stem agenda with the Arts agenda and the humanities agenda through understanding that the creative Industries is fundamentally built in science but it's about culture and it's about storytelling and it's about art and it's about creativity and all the good things that make us human and I think there's a there's a wider sensor it was one of the debates that was going on here yesterday that people don't necessarily understand what the creative and cultural sectors are about it's a nice thing that gets hap that happens down here and people can do it when they're you know they're wealthy enough to have this tired when they're retired well yeah it's all of that but actually it's fundamental to our country and our country's success and if you monetize it you know God help us thinking about it in that way then then we can actually say okay we can prioritize it because it's about growth and with that growth we get social Capital we get cultural capital and we can embed it in our curriculum such that it all underpins and joins up rather than you know it all being separated out as soon as you get to school and deciding what subject you're going to do and how you're going to work in stem and you're going to not become a dancer and you're going to work in AI instead well actually the very best of dancing in the future will be fundamentally built on some of AI and you need to be able to do both so it's less split and it's more joining up and the creative Industries is where that can happen I absolutely agree with Damian um very soon um uh gpt4 will be writing very good code and uh it already is right pretty average code uh and it'll be writing better or better code as as time goes on so the idea that life is all about stem skills is is completely wrong uh I mean if you look at Kingston University's surveys on this uh of employers as to what they want they want critical and creative abilities basically and what it's going to be about is can you use these tools in a creative way and they could be blockchain they could be uh internet of things they could be AI all kinds of different Tech uh tools but uh it's how you use them that's going to be really important and I really do empathize with teachers in this respect because you know the potential of some of these things like AI sat on a an ethical AI Institute chaired by Anthony Selden not long ago and you know the problem is that nobody knows what the guard rails around the use of AI should be when you're trying to personalize education you know use of data and all this kinds of thing is is really quite complicated so it's a it's a really tricky world so I think Ash is absolutely right that we need to be much more proactive with our teachers in terms of helping them uh understand the new world but we shouldn't make the mistake of just thinking it's all about stem we have got time for one super Speedy question hi uh Chris Barrett I'm involved in uh early stage support for the creative Industries both from public and private uh funding so uh earlier in the year we had a house of laws report saying creative Industries at risk we've now got this fantastic response from dcms and the creative Industries Council but the theme here we've got regenerate and we've talked a lot about clusters I'm trying to understand is is the purpose here to support uh Rising creative skills across the country or are we trying to create uh local centers of expertise I think it's probably probably um Damon's I think the first person I'm gonna yeah and they're going to thank you Chris and it's super Speedy yeah okay winding up soon it's really interesting to look at where the creative clusters currently are the current nine and what they focus on there's a significant bias to the the creative screen Industries and areas of the country where they're important what's real really uh you know I think what the the next bit of the creative sector vision and the next generation of clusters it has to fill gaps so it has to fit and I think you know the ones that are successful now is because of this coming together of technology in the screen Industries and what that means and how everyone's trying to address this but you know we look at parts of the country there's nothing across the Midlands and I know the Midlands felt as a midlander ex-middle to you know feel very sort of sore that they got left out of that conversation so this geographical parts of the country that need addressing and there's also sectoral parts of the country that need addressing you know one of the big massive gaps in the current creative clusters um sort of portfolio is music You Know music is hugely successful for the UK but there's nothing to support r d for the music industry and so that's really really important so how do you know given that this comes via universities how do universities get together and and leverage that expertise for what the industry wants and similarly there's nothing in design there's nothing in architecture there's nothing in publishing so there's clear areas of our creative industries that are very successful that need support in this same way the screen and live performance have through the current um sort of clusters portfolio yeah there's definitely work to be done in gaps to be filled thank you so being hopeful because I think that there's lots of Challenge and there's lots of complexity but I'm hearing overarchingly there is this big opportunity and it's a strength here so how do we seize it so let's end just with a hopeful thought please from each of you a sort of a positive and hopeful thought about what um the creative industry is this kind of wonderful creative thing that we're talking about uh covering go on Asha you got a thought um yeah I think I mean the thing I always think to myself is you know we could see this in a dystopian way or we could see this as the beginning of a like a whole new creative Renaissance you know this could is I let's let's see these things as tools um let's stay human centered you know with our focused and uh to start and if you're interested in in this technology and where it's all going don't be done don't feel daunted by it just start doing things with it I actually start experimenting um and using the tools uh my hopeful thing I'm going to bring it back to something was briefly mentioned at the beginning by mini is ABBA Voyage if you haven't go go it's the most remarkable thing it's a joyous joyous experience now I've been loads of my colleagues have been and we're all there kind of looking at it creatively and sort of analyzing it and thinking this is all very interesting isn't it it's the most remarkable experience and you just forget about that eventually and you just gets sucked up in it and so you've got basically a really big TV screen plus the musicians that are kept tucked away in the corner communicating with 3 000 people at every performance and it's utter utter joyousness and you're kind of going what is this thing that you're part of and it's hard to know but it is quite remarkable it took sort of five to seven years and 140 million dollars to do it and globally leading IP in what Abba are doing to curate their own IP ultimately into the future by saying right let's do it first before somebody else does it and and it produces the most amazing thing I'm going to bring it back to something else it brings it back to the design of the experience the whole thing is curated from start to finish shout out to stage one just over the road up in in near talk with New York did some of the staging for it um the whole onboarding as we'd call it is just amazing human-centered design human centered Design Center design yeah here here to that go go see it it's worth every penny Tim um well for me uh I mean I have a boring legislator um so for me it's about it's about making sure that technology is our servant not our master and if we Master it uh ourselves if it's our serpent then uh we can be immensely creative we can do things that we couldn't otherwise have done and I think that's what's so fantastic I mean I absolutely buy into the Clusters the catapults you know all the creative and tech industry activity taking place but as individuals it's really important that we fulfill our own talents and our lives uh uh reflect that and I think that some of this Tech can help us do that but we have to make sure that we've got the right regulation around it and it isn't all about Silicon Valley dominating uh just a few uh bits of AI you know I don't want to see a dystopian future uh where you have three AIS and it's like Coke and Pepsi or whatever you have to choose and they dominate the whole of your lives uh and this in the same way that for instance what about app stores there are only two sets of app stores aren't there effectively and yet we have to choose I don't want that to be the case in the future and I just want to come back to something that Asha said right at the beginning we are world leaders on creativity there's not loads of things where world leaders on um anymore but we are world leaders on creativity we have that reputation still and that perception and that is something therefore that's so precious for us to keep that invest in it be proud of it and see it is a massive opportunity to regenerate going forward your hands together for a fabulous panel thank you
2023-08-03