It’s been a long time since we last updated our website, and it felt like a refresh was needed. We've put together a stripped back, pared-down design which better highlights the work that we’ve been doing of late…

This month we launched Shift Click, an online digital industry skills programme for young people from Greater Manchester – working with Stockport Council’s Digital Transformation team and our community of amazing technologists, volunteers, and industry leaders.

Earlier this year, we launched two new digital products, both built by MadLab’s in-house team: Incredible – a new blockchain-backed skills recognition platform; and Basilisk, an “AI meets VR” work in progress which is… somewhat different.

Incredible – a  blockchain-powered skills accreditation service – was born out of a piece of work we recently carried out in Pakistan, funded as part of the British Council’s DICE programme. Working with digital training organisation DEMO (Islamabad), we also trained 800 women from across northern Pakistan (Swat Valley, Hunza, and Skardu) in digital business skills.

Meanwhile, Basilisk is a prototype semi-fictional “VR meets AI” experience, during which a superintelligence carries out its own product launch. Supported by Creative XR in 2019, our team continues to explore the emergent creative possibilities of deep reinforcement learning, alongside recent advances in natural language understanding (such as Google’s BERT and OpenAI’s GPT-3). The future is real.

Looking forward to 2021 is Making Spaces: an inclusivity programme for young digital makers with University College London’s Institute of Education and Institute of Making, Knowle West Media Centre, and Lloyd’s Register Foundation. We’re also preparing to launch two new digital skills programmes: Next Level Stockport - a part-time games development and 3D animation course, and Oldham Makes - a maker workshop programme.

You can take a deeper look at our work portfolio here, or sign up to our newsletter for regular updates.