GSA announce new School of Innovation and Technology - harnessing digital innovation to make future changes happen in the present.
Led by Professor Gordon Hush, the School of Innovation and Technology (SIT) will focus towards identifying future opportunities for innovation, alongside considerations of alternative ways of living in the present. This new School will dynamically combine Product Design’s track record of design-led social innovation - the design of new products, services and experiences - with Simulation and Visualisation’s historical expertise in evolving digital technologies and the applied use of data.
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The new School aims to integrate social innovations that build upon technological innovations in a way that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries within art and science. It offers an opportunity for students to learn how to critique the ways we live using design in combination with scientific knowledge, by thinking about what the capacity of designers will be to look at key changes needed now in multiple aspects of our lives. SIT will examine complex questions in fields such as healthcare, education, technology and pressingly within the context of the climactic and ecological crisis.
The second new post being created will be a critical support for this strategic outcome. Professor Paul Chapman will become The Director of Emerging Technology at GSA. Drawing on his vast experience and knowledge in technology and computer science, Chapman’s role will be as an advocate, a specialist and an ambassador across the institution for technological innovation, ensuring all of GSA’s students and staff are aware of the continuously expanding digital technologies that are available and supporting student ambitions to see how these can be used creatively within their own disciplines.
Many successful projects, current academic collaborations and external initiatives provide a foundation for SIT’s collaborative and outward focus:- developing innovative mixed reality patient leaflets for the NHS to aid patients understanding of complex medical procedures, working with companies like Subsea7 developing real-time applications for the visualization of complex offshore training procedures and work with Strathclyde University developing highly innovative XR applications for the production of medicines.
There are also opportunities to build on relations with external bodies which are already successfully established in public sector, healthcare and industry, including The NHS, Hitachi, HP, University of Glasgow, Institutes of CancerSciences, Sustainable Development Network and the Digital Health and Care Institute(DHI) as well as numerous companies in film and television.
TheSchool of Innovation and Technology’s on-going development will be informed by a very basic but vital question: ‘in order for there to be a future there has to be a different present, or different immediate future,’ we design for the next now. The collective aim of both SIT and Emerging Technologies Director will be to advance, support, cultivate and inform trans-disciplinary learning with an awareness that the possibilities of the present are constantly changing, while artificial intelligence and extended reality technologies offer opportunities for dynamic, reactive and creative ways of designing.