As co-founder and art director of Manchester's Factory Records, Peter Saville's radical designs were most famously used by Joy Division and New Order. More recently, he's designed for The Penelopes, The Duratti Column and Kanye West, external.

He's worked extensively in art, fashion and the wider cultural sector, and is consultant Creative Director to the City of Manchester.

Jez Green works for Manchester charity Mustard Tree, whose mission is: "to help those trapped in poverty or homelessness, by enabling them to gain the skills and self-confidence they need to reach their full potential".

The charity works across the city with partners from the police to arts organisations, and is currently collaborating with Karl Hyde on Manchester Street Poem, external.

Joanne Wilson has personal experience of homelessness, and now sits on the board of Manchester Homelessness Partnership and co-chairs its Homelessness Prevention Action group. She has worked with Karl Hyde and Jez Green on Manchester Street Poem, external.

Kevin Gopal is Editor of Big Issue North, the magazine that helps homeless people to earn an income. Previously, Kevin was a freelance journalist working mostly on business and politics.

From Fatherland, external to Manchester Street Poem, external to Interdependence, external, Karl Hyde might be the busiest man at MIF this year...

Not only has he written the music for Fatherland, but also he's currently spending his days covered in paint at UNFEAR in Manchester, creating poems with people who've experienced homelessness.

Conceived by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith from Underworld, Manchester Street Poem spotlights the stories of those who find themselves homeless in the city – in a work where the catch-all term ‘homeless’ will give way to individuality, identity and integrity. He's speaking about Manchester Street Poem as part of Interdependence's talks on community in a few minutes, too.

In amongst all this, Karl still found time to chat to BBC6Music's Lauren Laverne about his favourite tracks! Listen below:

Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is speaking as part of Interdependence: We Need To Talk About Community this afternoon, posts a handwritten note on his Instagram every day.

Rick Lowe was born in rural Alabama and currently lives in Texas. He is best known for his amazing Project Row Houses, external, a groundbreaking community-based art and housing project, which he started in Houston in 1994. The neighbourhood had had no investment for over 30 years, and Lowe started trying to build a new narrative around a very deprived area.

Project Row Houses aims to be "the catalyst for transforming community through the celebration of art and African-American history and culture", and you can find out more in the mini-documentary below.

He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Fellowship in 2004, and President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Arts in 2013.

People (and dogs!) down in Festival Square are having a great time in Manchester's fleeting sunshine... There's been some gorgeous photos shared on Twitter, too. Do share your snaps with @MIFestival, and we'll feature some of our favourites. Bonus points if they feature a dog.

Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944, and formed architecture practice OMA in 1975. He has been described as the world's most controversial architect – the Smithsonian magazine, external called him "a first-rate provocateur". His work includes the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015) the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), and Seattle Central Library (2004), and he was Director of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014.

Current projects include Factory in Manchester, a new arts centre due to open in 2020.

Our host for the afternoon, Jude Kelly, is Artistic Director of London's South Bank Centre. She was the founding director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and artistic director of Battersea Arts Centre from 1980 to 1985.

In 2010 she founded the Women of the World Festival, celebrating the achievements of women and girls as well as looking at the obstacles they face.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of London's Serpentine Gallery, as well as an art curator, critic and historian of art. Born in Switzerland in 1967, Obrist has been a hugely influential figure in the arts world.

He was ranked number one in ArtReview's annual list of the art world's 100 most powerful people in 2009 and again in 2016, external, and is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

Name: Christopher Stephen Clark, external

Born: St Albans

Lives: Berlin

Genre: Electronic

Label: Warp Records

First album: LP Clarence Park in 2001

In his own words: "I’ve got to a point with them [Warp Records] now where if I give them music, my standards are so obsessively high that it always gets to a point where they are begging me to just finish the album, and I’m just saying no, it’s not good enough." The Skinny, external.

Clark is playing tonight as part of Mary Anne Hobbs' Dark Matter series of gigs, external.

The Cotton Panic, or Cotton Famine, of 1861, is the inspiration for MIF's new 'industrial musical', external by Jane Horrocks, Nick Vivian and Wrangler, which opens tonight.

With the American Civil War raging in 1861, the production of cotton, mostly produced by slaves in the Southern States, dropped. This affected many workers in North West England, who relied on Lancashire's cotton mills for their livelihoods.

The supporters of the Southern states in America hoped that by holding England's cotton-manufacturing towns to ransom, they could force British support for their side in the war. What actually happened was that, despite privation and hardship, the cotton workers resolved to support the Union in its fight against slavery, which they called "a foul blot on civilisation and Christianity". Go, Lancashire!

President Abraham Lincoln personally thanked the cotton workers in 1863:

Justice, humanity and freedom: that sounds like an idea we can all get behind, doesn't it?

Created by Jane Horrocks, Nick Vivian and Wrangler, featuring Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire, Cotton Panic! uses a compelling collage of live music, drama, words and film to evoke an era lost to history: of hard work, of passion, and of the North of England’s inspiring solidarity with the slaves of the American South.

We're having a fascinating morning at Stoller Hall for Interdependence, external, but being here rather than at our usual base means we can't share any of Festival Square's great dogs with you at the moment. To tide you over, please meet Elsie, a MIRO robot, external who's sharing the stage with Professor Tony Prescott, Professor Joanna Bryson and Professor Bjorn Schuller this morning! We think she's pretty cute (dog? rabbit? donkey?), and it's briliant to hear how she might be used to calm children in A&E, or to support people with dementia.

Image source, MIF

Professor Björn Schuller is a Reader in Machine Learning at Imperial College, London. His current research explores child language experiences around the world, deep learning speech enhancement and how autistic children use language.

Professor Joanna Bryson works at the University of Bath, and, when she was at MIT, she played ice-hockey for a team called Halting Problem. Her principal research interests are around understanding cognition, particularly in relation to human culture and natural intelligence. She works in Artificial Intelligence, both in an academic context and more widely, looking at computer game characters and smart home technology.

Tony is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield and Director of Sheffield Robotics, an inter-disciplinary research institute across both Universities in Sheffield. His research interests include cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence and bio-inspired robotics. He also works for Consequential Robotics which makes MiRO, a cute, dog-like robot... Tony's brought no.26, Elsie, with him today. If you stroke her ears, she wags her tail.

Hannah is Science Correspondent for The Guardian, and was previously Science Editor of The Times. She presents the Science Weekly podcast for The Guardian, and has a PhD from Oxford in biomedical imaging. You can find her on Twitter @hannahdev, external.

If you enjoyed hearing from Nina Freeman as part of Interdependence: We Need to Talk about Technology, external this morning, why not check out her brand new game for MIF?

Our first ever game commission, Lost Memories Dot Net, external, harks back to the early 2000s, when Freeman was a young girl discovering the twin joys of online chat and creating websites. You’ll play a role based on the young Freeman, building both relationships and websites online while following a narrative that grows more intimate as the game goes on. Available to download from mif.co.uk/lostmemories, external during the Festival, Lost Memories Dot Net, external is a special work from a very singular talent.

Image source, MIF