Mr Jack Lowe

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Role:

Research Associate in Creative Economies

Department staff:

College of Arts, Technology and Environment

Qualifications:BA MA PhD
Position:Research Associate in Creative Economies
Department:College of Arts, Technology and Environment
Telephone:+44117 965 6261
Email:Jack.Lowe@uwe.ac.uk
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About me

I am a cultural geographer whose research explores how people engage with place through playful, site-specific and digital media forms.

Alongside and as part of my research, I am practising game designer, who specialises in designing interaction and narrative content that creates a sense of place or incorporates physical locations and actions.

Creative works have included The Timekeeper's Return, a mixed-reality treasure hunt in Canterbury's Cathedral Quarter played using QR codes; Interrobang?!, a genre-busting theatre-meets-online gaming experience that draws you into a real-time detective thriller; and The Gates to Dreamland, a locative audiowalk game based around Margate's Dreamland amusement park, which explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively can connects us to different times, places, stories and circumstances.

I am based in UWE's Digital Cultures Research Centre, where I am currently Principal Investigator on a project to scale a digital game I made about community ties to place, created using the what3words app. This project has been funded by ESRC/AHRC SHAPE Catalyst, AHRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) and UKRI Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF).

This work builds on my practice-based PhD project, Engaging with Place through Location-Based Games (completed in 2022 at Royal Holloway), which unpicked the relations between navigation and narrative that shape how people experience places with these media.

A further component of my research is in economic geography, where my work has focused on the interaction between creative industries and place-based economic policy. Up to March 2024, I was a core part of the UWE team researching, delivering and evaluating two creative R&D programmes: Bristol+Bath Creative R+D and Grounding Technologies. These programmes aimed to provide an ecosystem for individual creatives and SMEs to create innovative work using creative technologies in a way that is inclusive and sustainable.

I am a resident of the Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed, a digital creativity centre in central Bristol. I am also an active member of the Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers), where I sit on the committee, and am an Associate Fellow of Advance HE and the RGS-IBG.

Area of expertise

Cultural geography, economic geography, digital geographies, media arts, pervasive media, place, digital games, locative media, practice-based research, qualitative research, creative industries, creative placemaking

Publications

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