Asa Calow is founder/director of the Manchester Digital Laboratory AKA MadLab, a community space for science, technology and art in Manchester City Centre. As a freelance creative technologist with over a decade’s industry experience he has worked on a range of social and commercial projects: from intranet web services for 3i and AstraZeneca through to hardware prototyping and co-design with hard-to-reach communities in North West England and data-driven textual analysis technology for a Yorkshire based start-up