Programme

Leading independent creative AI curator and researcher, Luba Elliott will discuss some of the most contemporary applications of creative AI today.

Luba will present the state of the art in creative AI. The past few years have seen the development of AI art as a trend. From its beginnings with DeepDream and style transfer to GANs and CLIP, AI art has long moved beyond the world of research and academia to find itself straddling the worlds of media and contemporary art and now NFTs. The contemporary art world’s fascination with the social impact of facial recognition, recommendation systems and deep fakes has encouraged artists to explore AI critically as subject matter, while NFTs have shifted the focus back to aesthetics. This talk will give an overview of how artists and technologists are using and thinking about machine learning, its creative potential and societal impact.

You can also find this event on the British Science Festival website HERE

About Luba Elliott

Luba Elliott is a curator, producer and researcher specialising in artificial intelligence in the creative industries.  She is currently working to educate and engage the broader public about the latest developments in creative AI through talks, exhibitions and tech demonstrations at venues across the art, business and technology spectrum including The Photographers’ Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Impakt Festival, The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, CogX, NeurIPS and ICCV.

Luba is a partner of Leicester’s Art AI Festival, working as the Festival’s curator, and other recent projects include the online gallery aiartonline.com and NeurIPS Machine Learning for Creativity and Design Workshop. She is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence. Prior to that, she worked in start-ups, including the art collector database Larry’s List. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge and has a certificate in Design Thinking from the Hasso-Plattner-Institute D-school in Potsdam.

Online Luba can be found sharing AI updates on twitter, curating a Creative AI newsletter and art impressions on instagram.

Urban research across the region – Public session, led by Stefano De Sabbata and Jamileh Manoochehri

Leicester Urban Observatory is a collaboration between urban practitioners at Leicester City Council and academics at three local universities: De Montfort University, University of Leicester, and Loughborough University. It aims to establish and develop a combined centre of excellence in urban studies and planning for Leicester.

For Design Season the UO has developed ‘Urbanism’ a day where the UOP takes over at LCB Depot to present a range of works and ideas relating to the urban environment and the way we live and co-exist.

Follow the UO at Twitter @LeicsObs

Grant Butterworth Head of Planning at Leicester City Council to chairs presentations, debate & Q&A  with professional societies on the theme of Urbanism. Public session

Brought to you by Leicester Urban Observatory as part of LCB Depot’s Design for Life/Design Season 2022

Urbanism in Focus: A public debate between built environment specialists on how we live together and interact in and around Cities (Public Session)

Speakers include:

Michael Hopkins is a Principal Planner in the Local Plans Team at Charnwood Borough Council. Before working in local government he was a researcher in urban morphology at Birmingham University. He will provide a perspective on Urbanism reflecting on the relationship between Leicester, Leicestershire and Charnwood. He is interested in Urbanism as an emergent phenomenon linked to the parts and wholes that make up built form (bricks – walls – dwellings – street/neighbourhood – settlement) and the importance of difference and connections in its creation. He will explore relationship of Leicester as the central city with Loughborough and the Soar Valley villages and how urban or not they are in terms of form and function.

Dave Singleton was originally a geographer and surveyor from the East Midlands. He stopped making maps and moved into landscape architecture some thirty years ago. Latterly he has dabbled in urban design. And even urbanism. He set up DSA Environment + Design in Nottingham 2005. DSA is currently working on a number of public realm projects including in Sheffield, Rotherham, Grimsby and a redesign of Maid Marian Way in Nottingham as well as several large housing schemes and healthcare settings. Dave will introduce a perspective on Urbanism from the Landscape architect’s point of view. Dave teaches at Nottingham Trent University and University of Nottingham. He is an author of Building for a Healthy Life and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His interest centres on how people engage with place, in particular the role of blue-green infrastructure in making places, and what this might mean for the health of people, creatures and the natural environment upon which these depend. Dave considers Urbanism to be the study of people’s interaction with an urban (that’s to say in contrast to rural) environment.

Representative from the Royal Institute of British Architects (To be confirmed) To offer the perspective on how architects define, assess and respond to the challenges and opportunities of Urbanism

Leicester Urban Observatory is a collaboration between urban practitioners at Leicester City Council and academics at three local universities: De Montfort University, University of Leicester, and Loughborough University. It aims to establish and develop a combined centre of excellence in urban studies and planning for Leicester.

For Design Season the UO has developed ‘Urbanism’ a day where the UOP takes over at LCB Depot to present a range of works and ideas relating to the urban environment and the way we live and co-exist.

Follow the UO at Twitter @LeicsObs

Working lunch: Introducing food’s urban graphic heritage – Public session, led by Robert Harland. At this session we invite participants to bring and eat a lunch that holds meaning for them as a way to reflect on their heritage, family and lived experience. This could include places to eat, food from other countries etc

Leicester Urban Observatory is a collaboration between urban practitioners at Leicester City Council and academics at three local universities: De Montfort University, University of Leicester, and Loughborough University. It aims to establish and develop a combined centre of excellence in urban studies and planning for Leicester.

For Design Season the UO has developed ‘Urbanism’ a day where the UOP takes over at LCB Depot to present a range of works and ideas relating to the urban environment and the way we live and co-exist.

Follow the UO at Twitter @LeicsObs

Love Architecture is the annual series created by the RLSA and RIBA partnership for the region.  Taking place during LCB’s October Architecture month Leicester Design Season is this year proud to present the Love Architecture – Evening Lecture with Evans Vettori

http://www.evansvettori.co.uk/

Leicester has undergone significant culture-led regeneration with areas transforming into new, vibrant and exciting places. Discover more about Leicester’s Cultural Quarter by joining an informative, architect-led guided walk covering the history and recent transformation of the area from hosiery and boot making to today’s creative industries.

Architect Nils Feldmann, on behalf of the Leicestershire and Rutland Society of Architects, will expertly guide visitors around the Cultural Quarter. The walk will include the LCB Depot, Curve, Maker’s Yard and the Phoenix. Not to be missed! Meet in the Lightbox in our local architecture exhibition at the LCB Depot then join us for a tour of the cultural quarter.

Design stories shorts with Design Season partner ImageNova

Savena and Arda of digital arts and design company Identity 2.0 talk about their mission to empower and enable grown up debate around identity and data.

Are you looking to get into a career in design? Not sure what to study or where to spend your time?

Hear from Sam & Will, from Effect Digital’s design team, as they share their experiences on carving their way into the digital design industry and the lessons they have learnt along the way.

On LCB TV on YouTube from Thursday 28 October

Design stories shorts with Design Season partner ImageNova.

How does an events company offer their services when the world of events suddenly got cancelled? This is the story about Some Bright Spark and how they redesigned their business model to not only continue offering their services, but thrive in a post COVID-19 world.