Hannah Rudman has joined BOP Consulting as an Associate Director, to lead the development of their new Organisational Transformation services and practice. BOP is an international consultancy with a 20-year track record of working in the cultural and creative economy with government bodies, leading arts and cultural organisations, property developers, and international agencies.

Consistently growing over the last 10 years, BOP has worked on over one thousand assignments and have played a central role in the UK in promoting culture and creative industries within broader economic, social and educational agendas.

BOP also organises the The World Cities Culture Forum (WCCF) – an international network of more than 40 cities sharing a belief in the importance of culture – providing research, policy analysis and moderation services from offices in London, Edinburgh, Taipei and Shanghai staffed by BOP’s multinational, multilingual team of consultants.

As Honorary Fellow at Durham University, our multidisciplinary academic team  is running a research and development project with a Science Centre in Newcastle, the International Centre for Life. We are investigating whether engagement with science improves when innovation and creativity is at the heart of science education.

In order to test this, Durham University’s researchers have worked with practitioners from the Centre for Life and with designers to form a multi-disciplinary team to co-produce exhibits, which enhance creativity, innovation and scientific thinking.  Together, we have iteratively developed a new exhibit pod – specifically to encourage creativity and innovation, and to allow the research team to measure it. The Interactive Research Pod hosting the experiments is on the floor in the Brain Zone, a new gallery at the Centre.

Our first academic journal paper about using co-design and participatory action research approaches to develop the Pod and experiments has been published in Educational Action Research, and is available online open access for reading in full and downloading.

I’ve been thinking and writing recently about digital ethics, considering whether we are putting technology infrastructure ahead of people and society. Its a challenging conversation that academia has engaged with, but that has previously been missing from Digital Transformation and  IT professional practice.

Technology itself currently has little ethics or empathy – people become numbers, algorithms become the rules, and reality becomes what the data says (and what big data platforms fail to monitor or identify as fake). And yet we find ourselves at a point in a time where there are ethical issues of being a human in a digital age.

A couple of articles of mine, one on Digital Ethics and one I co-authored with Dr Nava Tintarev on Data Ethics have been hosted by Digit – a collaborative forum for news, views, opinions and insight; focusing on the digital economy and exploring the impact of technology on business and society.