Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI) Director of Programmes and Operations, Dr Jenny Knapp takes us through the latest developments in getting our new buildings ready.
We’re at an exciting stage of the renovation of these exceptional buildings on the old Vauxhall garage site on Avon Street, St Philips. Their beautiful original 200 year old stone walls have been exposed and repointed, the original trusses are secured, and a new roof will soon be revealed. The University’s Capital Projects team is working very closely with architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and contractors Aztech Building Services to ensure as much of the fabric of this corner of Bristol’s heritage is maintained as possible. Along the way they’ve found unexpected doors and windows and old industrial pipework – some of these discoveries were more welcome than others!
Reinforcement being added to the stone walls
Staircase installation
First new roof window
Concrete being poured for the data centre
Crushed materials being saved for use elsewhere
Retort house walls
Insulation everywhere!
Discovery of an old coal tar pipe
View of trusses under the temporary roof
In 2023 with the opening of the adjacent Coal Shed, we will add further specialist research facilities, partnership, training and meeting spaces. This will also become home to the MyWorld creative hub. The two buildings will become one dynamic new space and eventually we expect to host up to 250 people including staff, researchers, partners and collaborators.
It is a both a privilege and fascinating to expose and renovate such an impressive building that has, for so many years, been hidden away. Each site visit reveals interesting and often stunning new features that we hope to highlight and will contrast with the ultra-modern, world leading facilities which will sit alongside them. We will also find a new life within the building for objects that have been recovered such as cobblestones and some very large light fittings! The excitement is building as we prepare for moving in and we can’t wait to see the old and the new coming together in what we know will be a fantastic and inspirational new place to work and innovate with our partners.
The time lapse video below shows recent works of the renovation of the Retort House. It starts with stone wall cleaning, then the removal of parts of the concrete mezzanine floor slab to make way for a new staircase, this then leads on to removal of the asbestos roof and old roof purlins. Once the roof is removed you can see the temporary roof structure above.
What happened when half our workforce and most children and students started making extreme demands on our broadband and internet use? What did it mean for different parts of the country and economic resilience?
Here Dr Hannah Budnitz with BDFI Affiliate Dr Emmanouil Tranos calls for our industrial structures to place digital and socio-economic considerations front and centre to help us all keep pace with the changes to the way we work and study.
When COVID saw the UK government tell people to work from home in early 2020, the expectation was that they would use digital technologies to do so. Scientists worldwide have since highlighted how the pandemic has intensifiedthe effect of the digital divide (the gap between those who have access to the latest technology and those who do not).
Amid its COVID recovery plans for England, the UK government is aiming to expand digital infrastructure, 5G and fibre optic broadband across the country.
As our research shows, however, bridging the digital divide is about more than making sure everyone has access to digital infrastructure and having the skills to use it. Communication scientists speak of the third level of the digital divide: the capacity to use digital technologies to enhance economic activities.
Patterns of demand
Household demand for bandwidth to download large video files or stream faster from online television services has been growing for a long time. Conversely, until the pandemic hit, relatively few people were using data at a volume that would have affected network performance.
When half the workforce started working from home, however, and the country’s schoolchildren and students were sent home too, videoconferencing took off. We expected this extreme demand for telecommuting during working hours to change the pattern of internet use and broadband performance.
To determine how this affected the economic resilience of different places — their capacity to maintain economic activity — during the pandemic, we analysed data on the upload and download speeds that internet users experienced during the first UK lockdown in 2020.
We found that patterns of demand changed a lot in most of the UK, both in terms of download and upload speeds. People weren’t only using the internet to download data (movies or music, for example) but to upload data, primarily for videoconferencing. Zoom, after all, counted 300 million daily meeting participants worldwide at its April 2020 peak.
Socio-economic correlations
Now, only half of the UK’s workforce were able to continue working remotely. The other half still had to go into work or were furloughed.
To understand whether existing economic divides and digital divides overlapped or diverged, we first created clusters of local authorities based on upload internet speeds as experienced by internet users in these places during the lockdown. We then correlated these clusters with various economic and geographical variables: distances to cities, the north-south economic divide, different occupations, average earnings, number of jobs and businesses, and furlough numbers.
Our findings indicate that areas, including Bristol and Cambridge, with relatively slow and unreliable internet services were not those with the highest percentages of people on furlough. Increased demand for digital services such as Zoom and the resulting network congestion occurred in these areas where (and perhaps because) occupations were more economically resilient: they were able to continue operating despite the pandemic.
Conversely, some areas with reliably high broadband speeds, suffered economically as reflected in high furlough numbers. These areas are characterised by a lack of jobs in the kind of occupations (technology and business services) that enable workers to be productive at home.
The temporary shift to flexible working models ushered in by the pandemic appears to be lasting. Some employers want their staff to return to the office, but many more are planning for hybrid or flexible working. A few are considering a permanent shift to remote working.
This means that the demand for fast and reliable upload and download speeds during working hours in residential areas is here to stay. Ofcom’s latest reports already include more data on upload speeds, and internet service providers will no doubt need to focus more on what customers need during working hours. Government ministers, meanwhile, should be thinking not only about 5G and the wider digital infrastructure, but also about the sort of jobs and skills people need in order to make the best use of it.
As our research illustrates, in order for a place to be economically resilient — for the local economy to continue to operate — during a pandemic, government ministers, community leaders and economists alike need to consider not only the digital divides linked to the internet’s physical infrastructure, but also the associated economic and social divides.
Broadband policies, although necessary, cannot boost the economic resilience of places on their own, where the industrial structure does not align with occupations that incorporate the digital skills and capabilities to work from home. This complex web of digital and socio-economic divides needs to be incorporated into our thinking of local economies and government priorities.
“Researchers, businesses, government and diverse communities must come together to proactively shape our digital future”, say Professors Susan Halford and Dimitra Simeonidou, Co-Directors of Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI), the University of Bristol’s newest institute.
For the past decade Susan’s work has focused on the interface between social and computational sciences, while Dimitra specialises in high-performance networks and future internet research.
The BDFI is led by Professor Susan Halford (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies) and Professor Dimitra Simeonidou (Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering). For the past decade Professor Halford’s work has focused on the interface between social and computational sciences, while Professor Simeonidou specialises in high-performance networks and future internet research. The fusion of expertise across disciplines is core to BDFI, which aims to transform the way we create, utilise and evaluate new digital technologies to benefit our society now and in the future.
Professor Susan Halford
“The digital revolution has transformed every facet of our lives in ways that few of us could have imagined, from our choice of partner through to our future career prospects”, says Dimitra. “Even the engineers who developed the underpinning technologies cannot have foreseen the full extent of it.”
Susan adds “Once a technology is released into the world, it tends to evolve in complex and contingent ways – in response to market forces, government regulation and the communities and end users themselves. There are beneficial outcomes, of course, but also challenges, and not everyone benefits equally.”
These challenges have been brought into sharp focus by the COVID-19 pandemic. We have managed to keep our society and economy going as best as possible by relying on digital technologies. We’ve tried to understand the spread of the virus through data collection and epidemiological computer modelling; we’ve worked remotely where possible; bought essentials online; and even taken part in virtual gym classes. But many have also struggled.
“We used to refer to the digital divide, but some in the field have started talking about a digital chasm opening up now”, says Susan, whose work focuses on the sociotechnical aspects of digital innovation.
“We hear of people trying to do home schooling with a mobile phone and no keyboard, really basic fundamental things. And it’s not just to do with access to devices or networks, though that’s clearly important; it’s about digital skills, education and opportunities. Who is able to work from home and who is going out to work at risk of exposure to the virus? So, in many ways, it’s an opportune time to start talking about some of these issues with respect to digital futures.”
Proactively shaping futures
The next wave of the digital revolution, which will include the extension of technologies including artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual worlds and superfast connectivity, presents perhaps even greater challenges and opportunities. But rather than sitting back and letting the invisible hand of markets and other forces dictate how the technologies evolve and for whom, can we be more pre-emptive and proactively shape the future?
Susan and Dimitra believe we can. Their respective backgrounds, in sociology and engineering, reflect the wider interdisciplinary makeup of the BDFI. This includes academic colleagues across all six faculties of the University and a wider community of partners – from world-leading technology businesses and creative companies to local government and community organisations.
Professor Dimitra Simeonidou
“Typically, when we are looking at digital innovation from a technological point of view, it’s a very methodological process; everything has an input and everything has an output as part of a technical system,” says Dimitra. “What we do within BDFI is to include social, ethical, environmental and privacy considerations as an integral part of the digital technical design so we can innovate responsibly.”
Collaborative engagement
The BDFI has been made possible through £116 million in funding from a variety of sources, including Research England, philanthropic contributions and the BDFI’s partner organisations. The diverse group of 27 partners includes BT, Dyson, BBC, Airbus, Black South West Network, Ashley Community Housing and the West of England Combined Authority. The full-scale BDFI facility will be based at the University’s planned Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, which is set to deliver more than £600m of employment and financial benefit to the Bristol region’s economy over the next ten years. The innovative spaces there will include a neutral lab co-creation environment for University and BDFI partners; a Reality Emulator (an advanced digital twin facility) to test new technologies in alternative futures; and a highly interactive instrumented auditorium for groups of people to make collective decisions.
“Our approach is participatory and experience-based,” says Professor Simeonidou. “Our digital design methodology will be informed in the very early stages by how technology is being used in context. This will be key in driving technology creation fit for future society. The way technology is consumed, for example, by academics is going to be very different to how it is being consumed by a youth group in their own environment, and it is important to understand such differences. We’re involving the end user from the very beginning in our innovation process.”
As soon as COVID-19 allows, BDFI will bring people together into the shared co-creation spaces and labs, including academics, students, industry and local communities, to start the conversation and to start ideating among themselves.
In addition, BDFI will reach out, through high-speed fibre connectivity, with its collaborative, distributed community across the city, effectively creating its own ‘internet for social-technical innovation’. Ultimately, the hope is to take the BDFI approach across the UK and eventually globally.
A lot of people are talking about futures at the moment, but for the most part in a rhetorical way; whereas we’re really, really serious in thinking about how to engage much more directly, constructively and proactively with the futures we’re creating here in the present,’ says Professor Halford. ‘The way that we’re engaging different ecosystems and different forms of knowledge in the project of creating futures, with the kinds of technical facilities that we are building, I think that’s really quite unique. I’m not sure anybody is doing anything quite like that.’
