Project Advisors

  • Alastair Horne, Innovations Manager, Cambridge University Press

    Alastair Horne is Innovations Manager for Cambridge University Press's New Directions Group, a wide-ranging role currently focusing on prototyping new product types. A varied career has involved teaching English at Japan's Kyushu University, publishing 'involution', a experimental poetry magazine, and an ongoing doctoral thesis concerning novels about novelists.

  • George Walkley, Head of Digital, Hachette

    George is a publisher and holds the position of Head of Digital for the Hachette UK Group where he is responsible for enabling and driving digital initiatives including ebooks and apps. He has worked in publishing, bookselling and journalism; and in functional areas including strategy, operations, marketing and publicity, intranet and internet development. He is a regular speaker and panelist at industry events, educational institutions and conferences around the world, including the UK, Germany, Norway, Russia, Argentina and Saudi Arabia. George also sits on the operating board of the trade standards organisation Book Industry Communication. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Liveryman of the Stationers Company.

  • James Richards, Director, Chromatrope

    James Richards is Director of Chromatrope, a multiplatform consultancy with a particular interest in strategy, innovation and special projects. James was previously a development executive for the BBC where he set up and ran both the Vision Multiplatform Product Development and Learning Development teams. He is interested in the creative applications of technology and the development of new narrative forms as a way to reach new or hard to reach audiences. James has produced projects on behalf of the BBC for TV, radio, online, interactive TV and pervasive media platforms.

  • James Touzel, Partner, TLT LLP

    James is head of the Technology & Media Group at UK law firm TLT. He has been with TLT for over 14 years, throughout that time working with established and early-stage technology and media organisations. He is known for his work with digital media and mobile telecoms businesses, covering social networking, location based services and new media collaborations, where he advises on the contractual, intellectual property and privacy issues. He also deals with technology development and licensing arrangements, IT procurements and managed service solutions. James is actively involved in the development of early-stage media businesses and the related support networks. He is a trustee of Watershed Arts Trust Limited and non-executive chair of iShed CIC, who have a mission to pioneer innovation and new technologies in the creative industries. He is also a member of Science City Bristol.

  • Kenton O'Hara, Senior Researcher, Microsoft

    Kenton O'Hara is Senior Researcher in the Socio Digital Systems Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge where he is interested in social and behavioural practices of tangible and embodied interaction with pervasive technology. He has looked at a wide range of technologies applications in public settings, including crowd based games with large displays, location based experiences, mediascape authoring, cross media alternate reality games, interactive tabletops and collaborative jukeboxes.

    Kenton has authored over 60 publications and two books on public displays and collaborative music consumption. He has previously worked at at CSIRO in Australia as Director of the HxI Initiative, HP Labs, Rank Xerox EuroPARC and the Appliance Studio. He has worked on numerous award winning projects including the BBC's BAFTA and Royal Television Society award winning "Coast" location based experience.

    Kenton O'Hara
  • Kim Plowright, Freelance Product/Project Manager

    Kim has been working on projects where the internet, games and 'old' media fight like excitable kittens in a sack since before the last dot com crash. Most recently, she's produced/project managed Pepys Road for Storythings/Faber&Faber and Dreams of Your Life for Hide&Seek/Film4, a Bafta-nominated cross-platform... story... game-y... thing about dying alone involving bespoke software, a brilliant writer, a 3-day time-lapse photographic location shoot, and a (real) cat up a scaffolding tower. She has also worked on the cross-platform elements for the first series of Misfits for E4, Superme, Routesgame and a treasure hunt for the band Muse. She suspects she's one of the few people in the world who has converted a 20 year old corrupted Amiga word processing file in to an ebook (by hand). She is happy to think of herself as the doozer to the creative lead's fraggle, helping to fill out the architectural detail in creative storytelling ideas to make them buildable in code.

  • Laura North, Co-Director, Media Futures

    Laura North is Co-Director of Media Futures. The current Media Futures project focuses on publishing and innovation, and has included Publish! A Day of Innovation on the Future of the Book at the Watershed in Bristol, a Book Hackday and Publish! New Players, New Innovations at St Brides. The programme has been supported by the Creative Industries iNet, Cyprus Well, Plymouth University and NESTA. Laura co-programmed the Future City series for the Mayor of London's Office, which included events on the future of the creative industries and technology. She was also part of the central team at the National Year of Reading 2008, where she developed projects on digital innovation and literacy. She is a children's book author, with nine titles published by Hachette.

  • Nico Macdonald, Founder, Media Futures

    Nico Macdonald consults on innovation, design and media with clients in publishing, broadcasting and telecommunications. He co-created the BBC Innovation Labs, and in 2008 founded Media Futures, a high-level and hands-on project on media, society and innovation. The current Media Futures project, the Future of Publishing, has encompassed Publish! A Day of Innovation on the Future of the Book at the Watershed in Bristol and a Book Hackday in London. He is author of 'What is Web Design?', published by RotoVision, and writes for publications including the RSA Journal, the Guardian, Blueprint and Creative Review.

  • Nicole Yershon, Director of Innovative Solutions, Ogilvy

    Nicole Yershon began her career in advertising 25 years ago at Simons Palmer and GGT, two of London's most renowned creative agencies. In 2000, she joined Ogilvy London where she now works as the Director of Innovative Solutions. In her first four years at Ogilvy she overhauled the agency's broadcast and video capabilities, taking them from analogue to digital, with the creation of RedWorks Broadcast. Consolidated in 2007 into the Ogilvy Digital Innovation Lab (part of a worldwide network), the agency's innovation activities have seen Nicole build partnerships between industries and across media channels to fuel unprecedented creative campaigns, and educate, both within the agency and beyond, speaking at global conferences and building clients Labs of their own.

  • Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, Guardian News and Media

    Working for Guardian News and Media, Tom is Product Manager for core mobile and tablet applications including the Guardian and Observer iPad editions, and Android and iOS new apps. With over a decade of experience in creative technical development for heritage and media organisations, he has worked clients including IWM, London 2012, The Education Department, The Wellcome Trust, and of course the Guardian and Observer. Tom specialises in mobile product development, but continues to advise and consult in the heritage and museums sectors.

  • Tracey Guiry, CEO, Literature Works

    Tracey Guiry is the CEO of Literature Works, the literature development agency formerly called Cyprus Well. Literature Works supports writers, readers and the publishing industry to makes sure that everyone has access to the highest quality creative writing in the South West. The organisation provides creative writing courses, professional development initiatives, reader development programmes and also offers funding to organisations and individuals who want to increase their engagement with writing and reading. Literature Works was the lead organisation behind the Future of Publishing project in 2011 and Tracey spends much of her time working with writers from the whole range of written word formats and genres as they explore the opportunities provided by digital technologies.

Produced by iShed as part of the Sandbox Programme