About the SMARTlab
Operating from its new 'home' base at UEL, SMARTlab has spread its wings to fill new purpose-built studios, including the MAGIC (Multimedia & Games Innovation Centre) PLAYroom, incubation and training spaces with linked fabrication, simulation, and product design facilities and a partner high def multistream film/video facility all on site, in the heart of the London Docklands.
In existence (under a number of names, in a number of locations) for some fifteen years, the core SMARTlab team are now recruiting a new expanded core staff to help achieve the ethical, social and transformative aims of the SMARTlab ethos.
With a burgeoning research team and list of associated research fellows, international projects and publications, SMARTlab has gained a reputation over the past five years as one of the world’s leading Practice-Based PhD Programmes, and is viewed as an incubator for the next generation of talent and high-level scholarship in the ‘ArtSci’ domain.
The Ethos
SMARTlab's ethos is simple: we begin our research on each and every project by ‘landing’ in a community, culture or research environment, and then spending time getting to know the local people, issues, concerns and needs, before we form teams of artists, computer scientists, medical and social care experts, educators, and scholars. Each team then tackles a given issue and attempts to invent new technology tools with real social impact, whether for individuals, for groups, or for wider international aims.
We select our projects and our teams on the basis of ethical concerns, social engagement and the ability to work effectively in interdisciplinary groups, as well as for the originality and potential impact of the research, in basic and applied terms. We aim to effect knowledge transfer in everything we do, not only within our team and between our teams and local communities, but also in broader academic and industry relations.
We tend to begin projects by considering the needs of those communities or social groups least represented or supported by ‘off the shelf’ technology tools for education, communication, skills training and/or artistic and social empowerment.
The Communities (or 'User Groups')
Our three primary user groups are women, children and young people, and people with disabilities. We work off-site in women’s shelters, schools, hospitals, rehabilitation centres, and also in universities and industry think-tank settings and retreats. We also operate out of a new ‘home’ studio and ‘playroom’ at UEL, with sister sites in operation (and accessible via telematic stream) in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Montreal, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Aarhus, Fes, Marrakech, Alibag, Mumbai, et al.
We are funded from a variety of sources, many of which are listed below. We operate a not-for-profit company called Safespaces.net using new technologies ltd., which has been recognised as a best practice model for community engagement in creative technology innovation by the US government and by our partners at The U.N, Worldbank, Microsoft, The BBC, NESTA, The Carl Sagan Trust, The Wellcome Trust, The Gublenkian Trust, LEGO Europe, and many other past and present partners.
The Symbol
 The symbol of the SMARTlab is the butterfly: a creature of beauty (artistic aesthetic) and scientific wonder, and a metaphor for social change motivated by personal growth and empowerment. The ‘body’ of the hybrid creature known as SMARTlab is our academic core, and each of the two wings intersects with that body of key scholarship and applied research. One wing covers not-for-profit and community engagement projects (such as our TRUST project for children with disabilities, and our Safetynet global anti-domestic violence project), while the second wing covers the terrain of Creative Industries, and features our new MAGIC centre, where (in our new PLAYroom facility) we will host workshops, playshops, skillshops, networking events and research think-tanks for local and global partners in knowledge transfer.
Choose a wing, and fly. . .
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