The project provides a platform for networking and collaboration between Brunel University London, School of Design and UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology), Department of Design. The project will also benefit from participation by The Design Council in the UK, and The Korean Institute of Design Promotion (KIDP), Republic of Korea and Central Research Laboratory (CRL), UK. To act as platform for collaboration, the project adopts a focus for activities and events that is relevant to and appropriate for both partners due to their historic, technology-driven approach to design. As a starting point, we will examine how technology-driven design (i.e. Design driven by disruptive, emergent technologies like AI) may address some of the big societal challenges facing both Korean and UK (i.e. aging populations, sustainable economy, energy security). Through a series of activities and events, we will then consider the skills and knowledge required of future designers to apply technology through design to peoples lives. These will then inform an exploration of ideas towards pedagogic tools, methods and approaches to the development and implementation of future design curriculum. The future design education will aimed at providing students the skills and knowledge to work at the intersection between technology and people in addressing big challenges through technology-driven design. Thus, the networking project's focus is to explore and better understand how the skills and knowledge of future designers must change to respond to challenges and opportunities of disruptive technologies (for example, Artificial Intelligence). In this the project is part of an effort to understand how design education can be best placed to work at the intersection between people and technology to provide solution to big challenges on the horizon in the UK and Korea. This will be achieved through a strategic series of on-site, on-line and in-person networking activities, delivered across Brunel University London, UK and UNIST Korea. These activities are designed to both provide opportunity for exchange (including early career research involvement), and stimulate work towards future funding acquisition on topics related to best practice in design education for technology-driven futures, including how design may contribute to big societal challenges through technology-driven design innovation. With reduced funding for the creative arts, including design, in the UK and Republic of Korea, the project is a timely intervention aimed at mitigating education challenges now facing design. The networking project's scope will be expanded to include key UK and Korean partners (Design Council UK, Korean Institute of Design Promotion). The project will act a primer for larger funding acquisition and sustainable collaboration between Brunel Design School and UNIST Department of Design. The project will also look to expand beyond Brunel and UNIST Design, to include partners from across Brunel University London and UNIST. Both UNIST and Brunel Design's historic identities as technology-driven design schools will provide further foundation for the networking project focus and activities.

Both South Korea and the United Kingdom have been home to significant developments in the social and cultural analysis of language over the past forty years. Under the collective umbrella of sociolinguistics, fields have expanded to include areas of critical discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, semiotics, dialectology, conversation analysis, linguistic ethnography, applied linguistics, and others. These fields cover a wide range of topics, from the microanalysis of conversation and interaction to the global spread of English as a skill tied to class ideologies. While sharing intellectual origins as well as topical interests, sociolinguists in the UK and South Korean have had little opportunity for institutional or research collaboration. This network project aims to build connections around topics that are increasingly relevant for both academic and public domains. This project will do so by focusing on the sociolinguistics of contemporary Korean and its transnational movements. Now is an opportune time to build such a network for two reasons. First, the study of the Korean language has become hugely popular around the world, spread by interest in South Korean popular culture and media. This has led to huge growth in university enrolments in Korean language and Korean studies programmes, particularly in the UK. At the University of Sheffield, the Korean Studies program has grown from enrolling under five students enrolling per year to over seventy in the past ten years. Universities like SOAS, Edinburgh, Coventry, Manchester, Newcastle, and Central Lancashire have also seen a sharp rise in home student interest in Korean language and studies. Students receive high-level training in language as well as in academic areas of culture, society, history, and politics. Reflecting this growth, the South Korean government agencies have recently invested significant funding in the growth of Korean studies programmes in the UK. Second, research in South Korean sociolinguistics has been at the forefront of addressing emerging topics in recent years. These include the globalization of English, the commodification of language as a skill, language and schooling, regional and ethnic stratification of linguistic varieties, and ideologies that link ethnicity, language, and prestige in complex ways. Furthermore, South Korea's highly urbanized, globally mobile, and digitally connected society portends a number of emerging trends in the future of sociolinguistic analysis. This context includes the rise of hybrid youth registers, language-linked migration across the global South, multimodal communication, anonymous digital platforms, and communities of translation. These areas have received popular attention in South Korea as well as some scholarship in Korean and English. With the spread of both digital technology and global capitalism, these trends will spread to more contexts globally, and knowledge from South Korean cases can begin to set the agenda for other areas and scholars. These reasons suggest that new pathways of research and knowledge exchange between UK and South Korean scholars and institutions can have wide-ranging impact. The Sociolinguistic Futures network will not only aim to bring together researchers from the UK and South Korea who have not had opportunities to collaborate or share insights, but also establish pathways for students and early career researchers to pursue cross-cultural study, research, and mentoring opportunities. These pathways can lead to new transnational and transmedia research projects that continue to set agendas for sociolinguistic research in the coming decades.

This proposal describes a programme of research on single-particle and collective radiation-beam-plasma interactions at high field intensities, production of high-brightness particle beams with femtosecond to attosecond duration, new sources of coherent and incoherent radiation that are both compact and inexpensive, new methods of accelerating particles which could make them widely available and, by extending their parameter range, stimulate new application areas. An important adjunct to the proposal will be a programme to apply the sources to demonstrate their usefulness and also provide a way to involve industry and other end-users. The project builds on previous experiments and theoretical investigations of the Advanced Laser Plasma High-energy Accelerators towards X-rays (ALPHA-X) project, which has demonstrated controlled acceleration in a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator (LWFA), initial applications of beams from the LWFA and demonstrations of gamma ray production due to resonant betatron motion in the LWFA. The programme will have broad relevance, through developing an understanding of the highly nonlinear and collective physics of radiation-matter interactions, to fields ranging from astrophysics, fusion and nuclear physics, to the interaction of radiation with biological matter. It will also touch on several basic problems in physics, such as radiation reaction in plasma media and the development of coherence in nonlinear coupled systems.

The lab in a bubble project is a timely investigation of the interaction of charged particles with radiation inside and in the vicinity of relativistic plasma bubbles created by intense ultra-short laser pulses propagating in plasma. It builds on recent studies carried out by the ALPHA-X team of coherent X-ray radiation from the laser-plasma wakefield accelerator and high field effects where radiation reaction becomes important. The experimental programme will be carried out using high power lasers and investigate new areas of physics where single-particle and collective radiation reaction and quantum effects become important, and where non-linear coupling and instabilities between beams, laser, plasma and induced fields develop, which result in radiation and particle beams with unique properties. Laser-plasma interactions are central to all problems studied and understanding their complex and often highly non-linear interactions gives a way of controlling the bubble and beams therein. To investigate the rich range of physical processes, advanced theoretical and experimental methods will be applied and advantage will be taken of know-how and techniques developed by the teams. New analytical and numerical methods will be developed to enable planning and interpreting results from experiments. Advanced experimental methods and diagnostics will be developed to probe the bubble and characterise the beams and radiation. An important objective will be to apply the radiation and beams in selected proof-of-concept applications to the benefit of society. The project is involves a large group of Collaborators and Partners, who will contribute to both theoretical and experimental work. The diverse programme is managed through a synergistic approach where there is strong linkage between work-packages, and both theoretical and experiential methodologies are applied bilaterally: experiments are informed by theory at planning and data interpretation stages, and theory is steered by the outcome of experimental studies, which results in a virtuous circle that advances understanding of the physics inside and outside the lab in a bubble. We also expect to make major advances in high field physics and the development of a new generation of compact coherent X-ray sources.