As part of a set of foundational research projects under the theme 'Towards a National Collection: Opening UK Heritage to the World', the Preserving and Sharing Born-digital and Hybrid Objects project aims to contribute to the creation of a unified national heritage collection that includes born-digital cultural heritage. Contemporary culture is increasingly digital. From websites, applications and social media, to digital film, to digital artworks and design tools, creative practitioners in a range of fields are increasingly working with digital or hybrid physical-digital skills. However, this prevalence of digital culture poses a significant challenge to collecting organisations which are responsible for acquiring, preserving and making culture available to the public, now and in the future. In considering how to make our national collections accessible to the world, we must consider born-digital and hybrid material as an increasingly important part of those collections, otherwise we risk failing to preserve the vast majority of our contemporary culture for future generations and entirely omitting this important part of our culture from initiatives to make that culture accessible as widely and as meaningfully as possible. This project seeks to address the challenges of born-digital and hybrid collections by bringing together expertise in a range of different digital cultural types - from archival and library material to film and complex digital design. It will focus on three specific and shared challenges: collections management - the policies, governance, systems and standards needed to support digital collections; digital preservation and conservation - the skills, software and hardware needed to preserve it for the future; and meaningful access and experience - the development of modes of access that do not merely represent digital culture as static, but 'live' as we experience it. It will involve a combination of desk-based research, reviewing and producing reports on current practices, a series of workshops, and the development of two technical pilots. Collectively this research and these outputs will lay the foundations for the future major research initiatives needed to take this forward on a sector-wide scale. The research will be undertaken through an interdisciplinary team of academic and collections-based researchers including representatives from the V&A, BFI, Tate, British Library and Birkbeck, University of London. It will also draw in a number of key industry professionals and will bring national and international participants to a series of workshops that will both involve knowledge sharing and will identify recommendations needed to preserve and make accessible born-digital cultural heritage. By harnessing the collective skills, knowledge and challenges of individuals and institutions involved with different types of born-digital and hybrid cultural heritage, the research project will ensure that born-digital culture remains an integral and research-led part of the national collections of cultural heritage. It will also identify and respond to the need for the development of digital skills and literacy across the cultural sector, so identifying future needs and laying the foundations that are needed in order to truly and inclusively open up the UK's national collections to the world.

We want 1 million people to directly benefit from new adaptations of Leapfrog tools by unlocking the potential for practitioners across the UK and beyond to work at new scales. We will build on the success of the Leapfrog project by working with new public and third sector partners to help them engage with large groups. This will range from community meetings with hundreds of people through to some interactions that will have over 100,000 people using an adapted Leapfrog tool in a Design Week. To do this we will use co-design to collaboratively create and adapt Leapfrog tools with our partners, giving them tailored resources to support their work, and producing shareable tools available freely worldwide. Amongst the many challenges faced by the public sector at this time, there is a growing need to meaningfully involve more and more citizens, service users and communities in the difficult decisions that affect them. Scaling Up Leapfrog responds to this need by enabling our partners to directly take on the challenges that surround engaging hundreds of thousands of people in meaningful, creative dialogue. With our partners we will co-design Leapfrog tools to support engagement with 80-100 people at a time, a significant shift in scale from common engagement practice that generally engages ten or twenty people at a time. We will also collaborate with our partners to unlock new scales for parallel engagement, producing Leapfrog tools that help form connections between multiple events in a single initiative. Our partners range from those in public health (Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group), to national charity networks (Food Power), international design networks (World Design Weeks Network) and museums (Victoria and Albert Museum). These partners each seek to enable their staff to perform effective, creative engagement with an increasing number of participants. For some of our partners this is driven by a desire to make a population more health aware and to develop a social movement to that end, engaging with the most disadvantaged people and helping their voices have an effect in decision-making or to help eradicate food poverty by drawing on the expertise of people living in food poverty. We also have 'reach partners' who are working with very large numbers of people (e.g. Milan Design Week had over 400,000 attendees in 2018), we will work with the heads of 10 design weeks to develop new tools to help them engage with their audiences en-mass. We will use co-design to collaboratively design and test ways of enabling these new scales of engagement for our partners, giving them direct value during the project, and on-going value as new practices and resources becoming part of their organisational vocabulary. Our approach to the co-design of tools is exemplified in a stream of work from the current Leapfrog project (2015-2018) We co-designed with 20 librarians to help make this transition to mixed-service teams and spaces a more positive experience. Being led by them, together we developed a range of tools to help new teams form and function effectively. In Scaling up Leapfrog, one could imagine a tool being adapted from the Librarians 'New team tools' to help people explore the contents of a design week collaboratively; this could be incorporated into the tickets created for the design week. Its very important to note though, our experience is that the real insights come from actually co-designing with partners, the real outcomes of the co-design process are likely to be unexpected and all the more innovative for that. The new practices, tools and resources that are produced through co-design with our project partners will also have relevance across a diverse range of organisations, sectors and contexts. All the tools produced by the project will be shared freely through the Leapfrog website (www.leapfrog.tools), building on a library of free, resources available (and used) worldwide.

Until now, the textile heritage of minorities has often been the object of abusive cultural appropriation practices undertaken by fashion brands or has been systematically obscured or undervalued as 'non-fashion' produced by 'the other'. With the mass displacement of people on the rise (due to global and local political, economic, and environmental issues), it is clear that we need to rethink and address the needs and aspirations of migrant minority communities and find ways to honour their diverse cultures. Furthermore, to avoid the current situation where designers are 'parachuted' into marginalised or disadvantaged communities with the assumption that bringing their knowledge and expertise is the answer, there is a need to 'decolonise' such dominant approaches, liberating design from its legacies of colonial thought, whilst leveraging the values of diversity, inclusivity and sustainability. This research aims to provide an in-depth understanding of decolonised fashion and textile design practices through the lens of cultural sustainability. Besides the three commonly recognised pillars of sustainability (i.e. environmental, economic, and social), this research argues for a need to consider also a cultural dimension, meaning diverse cultural systems, values, behaviours, and norms. Adopting a holistic approach, this research will focus on textile and fashion artisanal practice carried out by communities of 'diverse locals', meaning refugees who, despite their traumatic journeys, retain their culture, customs and faiths, as well as a variety of invaluable craft heritage skills. This research intends to fill a gap in knowledge through its focus on what refugee communities can teach us, in terms of cultural sustainability, community resilience, and social entrepreneurship. Adopting an embedded and situated approach to designing, participatory action research will be undertaken with communities of refugees living in East London. The research participants will be selected from a variety of cultural backgrounds in light of their past experience working in the textile and fashion industry in their home countries, to leverage their untapped skills and knowledge and facilitate their potential integration in the local economy and society. Oral histories will be collected in relation to the communities' material culture, in order to make sense of their cultural heritage, conduct co-creation workshops aimed at developing social entrepreneurship models to enhance the resilience of the refugees, and outline policy recommendations for sustainable regeneration. It is expected that the research will contribute to raising project participants, design practitioners and researchers' awareness of issues of cultural sustainability, promoting decolonised fashion practice, and recognising diverse forms of entrepreneurship that go beyond traditional standards from the Global North. The research will also benefit the participating communities through amplifying their voice and agency, enhancing their fashion and textile making skills as well as entrepreneurial capabilities, and informing the development of sustainable regeneration policies. Moreover, a collection of fashion and textile artefacts embedding the cultural heritage of the participating communities will be co-created and sold in order to raise funding to support on-going community-led fashion-related entrepreneurial activities. Finally, although the field work will be undertaken with communities in east London, findings from the research will inform the development of a framework for designing for cultural sustainability, social entrepreneurship and sustainable regeneration that is apt to have broader applicability and replicability across the UK.

'Indian-British Connections' extends the public remit and international impact of the AHRC-funded collaborative research project 'Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad 1870-1950'. Drawing on the proven success of the UK exhibition (touring 2010-11), the new project proposes a diverse range of new activities to generate further dissemination of Making Britain's findings in India and Britain. Featuring rich visual evidence as a powerful conduit to provoke dialogue on a history that has largely existed outside orthodox frames, it will swivel the perspective to examine India's role within Britain (rather than Britain's well documented imperial influence in India) creating in particular a display reconfigured for Indian audiences. This exhibition will trace a transverse lineage of Indian-British interactions across the race, class, gender divide and draw public attention to the complex realities of both countries' intertwined histories. The impact of the 12-panel display will be enhanced by a catalogue, talks, workshops and learning materials. These activities will direct attention to the depth of research underpinning the project and the many stories of political, social & cultural consequence underlying it. Simultaneously, in the UK, the BL will add new online content(microsite/timeline) to the BL Learning website. A photographic history drawing on UK/India collections will expand the visual narrative and further enhance public understanding of the mixed heritage of present-day Britain. These activities respond directly to major national and international demand generated by the project's many substantive, path-breaking outputs (interactive database, academic publications, workshops, conference, UK exhibition) and by academic and public audiences during Making Britain's final phase. In June 2010, India and Britain signed a Memorandum of Understanding to promote cultural exchange. This timely agreement directly involved several major museums in Britain, including the BL, which highlighted the project in a joint press statement released by the Dept. for Culture, Media and Sport. In June 2010, the British Council requested 4 preview panels to display at a reception in Delhi for the UK government delegation's visit. Subsequently 'Making Britain' benefited from considerable public and media interest evidenced by the Guardian's commissioning of an interactive timeline on South Asian Britain for their World News webpage (Sept. 2010). The proposed follow-on public engagement activities are directly encouraged by this response and the BC's keen interest to co-ordinate the exhibition tour in India. Led by the OU (Nasta, PI Making Britain), the project will continue its successful working relationship with the BL and pioneering historian Dr Visram (senior consultant; original project). In addition, it will develop productive new networks and knowledge exchange partnerships across the cultural, heritage, museum and education sectors. The timing is auspicious, given the keen support from museum partners as well as RCUK's 'India strategy' which aims to promote Arts and Humanities research links between India and Britain. Professional affiliations with the British Museum, British Council (India), National Archives of India, RCUK (India), and Southbank Centre (London) are established and link a large network of internationally distinguished scholars, educationalists and curators, bringing new perspectives and value. By its focus on specific Indian British interactions which illustrate how these early South Asians shaped Britain's cultural, political and economic life, 'Indian British Connections' will complicate and add graphic depth to contemporary understandings of 'diaspora' and 'migration'. This will fill a major gap in public knowledge of the significant contributions this population made to the formation of the UK's long multicultural history and the makings of present-day post-colonial India and Britain.

This project examines the use of artefacts to strengthen interregional relations and enhance awareness of different cultures. Focusing on Korean objects in UK museum collections, it questions how their collecting and display manifest the relationship between the UK and South Korea in past and present times. The project is underpinned by the belief that art can raise awareness of a nation, strengthen intercultural connections, and promote cross-regional interests. Despite this, the role of museum artefacts in diplomatic and political contexts remains under-researched and the project therefore fills an important gap. The project draws on international studies on soft power and nation branding. Soft power may be defined as the ability to achieve objectives through attraction and persuasion, while nation branding refers to the image and reputation of a state. Increasingly, governments have realised that a nation's ability to influence decision making processes and behaviours in the international arena heavily depends on these two factors. Art plays a key role in this as many soft power schemes center on cultural and creative outputs. This is also the case in the UK and South Korea where art objects and their public display have been central to UK-South Korea soft power agendas. This is reflected in the fact that London is the only European capital with two galleries of Korean art, housed in major public institutions, namely the British Museum and the V&A Museum. Both were funded by Korean sponsors with the aim to improve Korea's nation brand. The significance of the project lies in its facilitation of cross-institutional dialogues between UK and Korean stakeholders from academic and cultural institutions who work directly with Korean cultural heritage. The nature of the project necessitates an interdisciplinary approach, and it brings together expertise in the fields of art history, museum management, curating and international studies. This enables us to approach the theme of the project from different methodological, theoretical, and curatorial perspectives. It creates an interpretative platform for asking critical questions, such as: How is the national image of Korea narrated visually through representations of Korean artefacts at the British Museum and the National Museum of Korea? Which concerns underpin exhibition displays of Korean artefacts in the UK and Korea? Which issues drive the display of Korean objects at university museums, such as Ewha Womans University Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge? How can UK museums learn from South Korean curatorial practices and vice versa? The project centers on a range of activities held in the UK and South Korea, aimed at establishing interdisciplinary dialogues, and cross-regional networks. Spanning conferences, fieldtrips, site visits, roundtable discussions, published outcomes and an online platform, the project will produce a range of short, mid, and long-term outputs aimed at academic beneficiaries and the wider public. The project will strengthen relations between UK and South Korean museums and enhance mutual understanding of key issues and challenges. It will positively influence the next generation of academic and museum professionals, further their knowledge and expand their networks. The project will enable us to develop a larger collaborative scheme that will contribute to broader discussions of art diplomacy and nation branding in the UK and South Korea, incorporating a wider set of case studies.