Centre for Blended Realities: exploring how human realities interact with a fast evolving world

This expanded understanding of reality opens up space for research that is cultural and ethical as much as it is technical. Hetty Blades describes her work as a form of “critical reflection on technology,” particularly in response to the interactions between dance and technology. For her, ethical questions need to be addressed early, before tools become invisible infrastructures that shape behaviour without scrutiny.

For Teoma Naccarato, whose background is in dance and performance, this scrutiny is inseparable from the body. Her research focuses on “technologies that are in, on and around bodies and movement,” drawing attention to how sensing technologies, interfaces and systems intersect with physical presence and agency. In blended realities, the body is not a neutral user but a site where power, access and representation are negotiated.

A consistent theme across the Centre’s work is a commitment to amplifying voices that are often marginalised in technological decision-making. Rather than assuming expertise flows in one direction, CBR researchers emphasise listening, co-creation and participation. Milnes describes this as “allowing those voices to be heard,” particularly in communities more likely to be shaped by technology than to shape it.

This approach is evident in Dylan Yamada-Rice’s research with children, which challenges the assumption that young people are naïve or uncritical users of technology. “When you go into schools and talk to kids,” she says, “they’re very critical of stuff. They understand smart technologies are tracking them. They understand that their data is being collected.”

Rather than shielding children from technology, Yamada-Rice’s work often involves inviting them to dismantle and interrogate it. “I started to work with children to take apart technologies and hack them,” she explains, creating space for curiosity, experimentation and resistance. In this context, technology becomes something that can be questioned and reimagined, rather than simply consumed.

Technology beyond the commercial packaging

CBR’s outlook could be described as optimistic, but that optimism is not rooted in faith in technology itself. It rests instead on confidence in people’s capacity to question, repurpose and redirect it. Miller acknowledges how easily tools become captured by commercial or extractive uses, but argues that this capture is neither inevitable nor definitive. “Just because they’ve been packaged and branded in a certain way,” he says, “doesn’t mean that’s the end of the story.”

This is particularly the case with Nick Peres, who combines his role at Falmouth with working as Director of Digital Innovation and Transformation at Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, where he co-leads the Digital Futures programme, and as XR technologies adviser for NHS England.

“Across health and care, whether that's a clinical setting, a community organisation, a care home or a creative programme, the tools being adopted are rarely shaped by the people who will live with them,” explains Nick.  “The communities most likely to benefit are often the ones least likely to have had any influence over the design. What interests me is what happens at the edges, where creative practice meets care, where participatory approaches sit alongside clinical or community need, where something built in a studio ends up mattering in someone's everyday life. 

The role of place

This perspective is closely tied to place. Cornwall, often framed as peripheral to technological innovation, has long been a site of creative experimentation. As Miller notes, “Cornwall has long since been a really vibrant place of creativity and the development of new technologies.” At Falmouth, that history is reflected in a legacy of making, critical art practice and technological curiosity.

“Boundary spaces are uncomfortable for institutions, but they're where the most useful things tend to happen,” Nick continues. “Cornwall gives us a particular opportunity to test that, and for a university rooted here, there is a real responsibility to make sure the work is genuinely in service of the communities around it.”

What emerges from CBR’s work is not a research agenda centred on speed, scale or solutions, but a set of questions that a creative university is particularly well placed to address: who technologies are for; how bodies, creativity and care are accounted for; how communities can work with technology rather than being acted upon by it; and how realities remain plural, contested and open to change.

In a rapidly evolving technological landscape, that commitment to holding space for human-first inquiry is less a position than a responsibility, and one that creative universities are uniquely equipped to sustain. 

Further reading

Read more on How creative universities should respond to AI by Russell Crawford, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Interim).

Read more from William Huber, who designed the Artificial Intelligence for Creative Practice MA.

Find out more about our Centre for Blended Realities