Research Talks
All members of Darwin are encouraged to present their research at informal seminars held on Tuesdays and Thursdays during term. Everyone is welcome, whatever your degree or discipline.
Darwin members pick up lunch from 12:00, taking it into the Richard King Room (on the left at the top of the stairs leading to the dining hall) or 1 Newnham Terrace (straight through at the far end of the dining hall). Wine is served. Non-Darwin members are welcome to attend, although lunch is only available to guests of members. The talk begins at about 1:15 and lasts for about 20 minutes and is followed by questions over coffee. We adjourn at 2:00pm at the latest.
Upcoming Talks
Peer-to-peer energy-trading platforms (P2P) have the potential to transform the current energy system. However, research is presently scarce on how people would like to participate in, and what would they expect to gain from, such platforms. We address this gap by exploring these questions in the context of the UK energy market. Using a qualitative interview study, we examine how 45 people with an interest in renewable energy understand P2P. We find that the prospective users value the collective benefits of P2P, and understand participation as a mechanism to support social, ecological and economic benefits for communities and larger groups. Drawing on the findings from the interview analysis, we explore broad design characteristics that a prospective P2P energy trading platform should provide to meet the expectations and concerns voiced by our study participants.
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Digital telecare and advanced assistive technologies are at the forefront of policy making in elderly care in the UK. In theory, these technologies can help people to live independently for longer. But there is a lack of evidence to support this theory without further enquiry. This research contributes evidence about the supply side: the provision of advanced and digital care services for older people living in England. It asks how these services are coordinated, and how provision itself might affect the kinds of benefits that this technology can offer. Data was gathered from interviews with suppliers of smart home technology, with housing and care providers, with local authorities and with other public and private stakeholders otherwise involved in adult social care and telecare provision. The findings suggest that shortfalls in capacity have left housing and care providers unable to build coherent, cross-sectoral telecare strategies with industry partners. Telecare has been framed as a means of shifting care away from residential institutions and into the home - a solution that is meant to allow spending on adult social care to be reduced and made more efficient. But this pressure on local adult social care budgets means local authorities can lack the capacity required to play a strategic role or to align the efforts of those engaged in telecare delivery. Machine learning means that smart assistive technology can potentially be used to predict certain problems and prevent the need for emergency healthcare. But this preventative agenda is obstructed by funding gaps, legal gaps, and the lack of a comprehensive strategic policy. The different actors and agencies responsible for coordinating provision rely on one another but must also pursue their own separate agendas for survival in a new, volatile market. This can inhibit the integrated delivery of digital telecare services. The emphasis on innovation in telecare is largely at the level of product design, with funding mostly available for the development of new technology. But surrounding these products are the services that make them available. These telecare services have usually received less attention to their design. A particular area of oversight was how products would work given the different capacities and abilities of carers and other responders. All of this means that the technological ‘fix’ offered by smart assistive technology should also be understood as a social and political issue.
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I will present "Climate Change – the board game", a free educational board game that I created based on the research of the Evolutionary Ecology Group in the Department of Zoology. Its aim is to let the players experience first-hand how the changing climate has affected the evolution of animal species in the past, and what are the consequences of the ongoing climate emergency in the future.
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