All of the artists we approached leapt at the chance to participate in such a novel environment. With the help of former PAL Lab Director. the poet Maura Dooley, we commissioned six new poems from Wendy Cope, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jackie Kay, Dennis O’Driscoll, Don Paterson and Jo Shapcott. These provided a daily prompt and stimulus alongside a ‘hard’ question. PAL Director Susan Benn wrote, “The popularity of Dominic Muldowney and his maths and music lecture, the discussions evolving from participants receiving daily poems, the architecturally bizarre experience of designing an electronic garden in Regent’s Park with household appliances and the confrontation between a contemporary choreographer and her audience of scientists was a unique trans-disciplinary experiment!” All but one of the research projects developed at the sandpit received further funding to a total of £1 million.
January 2006 | Playing in the Risky Sandpit
Interventions in the Sandpit for Scientific Uncertainty and Decision Making for Regulatory and Risk Assessment Purposes, for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Possibly PAL’s most unexpected engagement in science to date, was this invitation to contribute to the design and facilitation of a five-day residential project-development event for 28 scientists. This 'sandpit' was on the theme of scientific uncertainty and decision making for regulatory and risk assessment purposes. After some thought, we focused in on providing provocative interventions on the themes of risk and uncertainty.
EPSRC Team
Peter Grindrod - Sandpit Director
Susan Morell - Head of Engineering Sector Team
PAL Team
Susan Benn - PAL Director
David Greene - architect, co-founder Archigram
Wendy Houstoun - choreographer/dancer
Dominic Muldowney - composer
Samantha Hardingham - Research Fellow, Centre for Experimental Practice, University of Westminster
Poems commissioned from
Wendy Cope
Lavinia Greenlaw
Jackie Kaye
Dennis O’Driscoll
Don Paterson
Jo Shapcott
Participants
Sondipon Adhikari - Lecturer in Aerospace Engineering, University of Bristol
Tim Bedford - Professor of Risk & Decision Analysis, Strathclyde University
Jonathan Benger - Consultant in Emergency Medicine, United Bristol Healthcare Trust & Senior Research Fellow, UWE
Jerry Busby - Senior lecturer in Management Science, Lancaster University
Peter Challenor - Head of Laboratory for Satellite Oceanography & Deputy Head, James Renell Division for Ocean Circulation & Climate, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton
Mike Christie - Professor of Reservoir Engineering, Institute of Petroleum Engineering, Heriot-Watt University
K A Cliffe - Professor of Computational Applied Mathematics, University of Nottingham
Helen Clough - Lecturer in Risk Analysis & Statistics, Veterinary Clinical Sciences, University of Liverpool
Melissa Cole - Lecturer in Information Systems, Computing & Mathematics, Brunel University
Greg B Davies - Director, Decision Technology, ELSE, University College London
A. Philip Dawid - Professor of Statistics, University College London
Suraje Dessai - Senior Research Associate, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Simon French - Professor of Information & Decision Sciences, Manchester Business School
Jim Hall - Professor of Earth Systems Engineering, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Zoran Kapelan - Senior lecturer, Centre for Water Systems, University of Exeter
Graham Kendall - Reader, School of Computer Science & IT, University of Notingham
Ruth Levitt - public policy researcher and analyst, RAND Europe
Rebecca Lunn - Senior lecturer in Civil Engineering, University of Strathclyde
Peter McBurney - Senior lecturer in Computer Science, University of Liverpool
David R. Newman - Lecturer, School of Management & Economics, Queen’s University, Belfast
Jeremy Oakley - Lecturer in Statistics, Dept of Probability & Statistics, University of Sheffield
Simon Pollard - Chair in Waste & Environmental Risk Management, Cranfield University
Berc Rustem - Professor of Computational Methods in Operations Research, Imperial College
Emma Soane - Reader in Occupational Psychology, Kingston Business School
Stephen Senn - Professor of Statistics, Uinversity of Glasgow
Funded by
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council