Horizon, a multidisciplinary digital economy research centre, is building technologies that capture human data to create deeply personalised experiences—from tailored healthcare to customised energy advice. This matters because the digital economy is maturing: the social, physical, and digital worlds are blending, and human data has become a valuable but often opaque asset. Current systems collect data without transparency or user control, and they rarely design experiences that prioritise personal fulfilment, wellbeing, or sustainability. Horizon addresses three gaps: making data collection and interpretation more transparent; designing new kinds of experiences that promote human values; and tackling ethical challenges around privacy and data ownership. If successful, this research could reshape how people interact with digital services across creative industries, retail, finance, energy, transportation, and healthcare. Instead of passive data extraction, users might gain meaningful control over their personal information while receiving experiences—such as wellbeing apps or sustainable shopping tools—that genuinely serve their needs. The centre also trains the next generation of digital economy researchers and sustains a national community through conferences and doctoral programmes.
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Horizon is a multidisciplinary centre for Digital Economy (DE) research and impact. We balance the development of new technologies to capture and analyse human data, with explorations of how these can be used to deliver powerful experiences to people, with an awareness and understanding of the human and social values that must underpin these. We follow a user-centred approach, undertaking research in the wild based on principles of open innovation. In its first phase, Horizon has established a core team of over 50 researchers and has reached out to build a wider network of 35 academic and 200 industry, public and third-sector partners. We have established a Centre for Doctoral Training and inaugurated the DE All Hands series of conferences and national DE CDT Summer School. World-class scientific outputs in diverse disciplines have been balanced with economic, cultural and societal impact. This proposal builds on this critical mass to enable a step-change in Horizon's translational research and impact. We respond to the changing nature of the digital economy as it matures, as the social, physical and digital become blended and as human data becomes an increasingly valuable asset. We offer a vision in which human data enables the creation and delivery of highly personal experiences. We propose to address three major challenges. The first is to establish new technologies that collect and interpret our human data in a more transparent way. The second is to be able to better understand and design new kinds of experiences that employ these technologies to promote the values of personal fulfilment, wellbeing and sustainability. The third is to address key ethical challenges around design for privacy and new models of ownership. We will work closely with a range of external partners whose interests span: computing and analytics; social policy; and diverse sectors of the DE including creative industries, retail, fast moving consumer goods, finance, energy, transportation and healthcare. We will engage these through a programme of agile translational research projects. These will be integrated into an overarching strategic impact campaign that revolves around three flagships. In turn, these will be supported by two further programmes; one targeted at sustaining the wider DE community and the second at developing the capacity of our researchers to deliver translational research and impact.
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