1. Open Collaborative Making
A Digital Perspective
As part of V&A Digital Design Weekend 2014

2. First published in the United Kingdom in 2014.
Published by Uniform Communications Ltd.
Uniform Communications Ltd, 2014.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means; electric or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any other information storage and
retrieval system without prior permission in
writing from the publisher.
ISBN : 978-0-9576868-1-6
Printed in Great Britain.
Edited by
Jon Rogers, Irini Papadimitriou
and Andrew Prescott
Design by
uniform.net
Open Collaborative Making
A Digital Perspective
As part of V&A Digital Design Weekend 2014

3. Welcome
Anyone that knows me will know that I love food. I love the way that reading Yotam
Ottolenghi, Madhur Jaffrey and the Sams Clark have completely changed how I cook
and what I eat. Because of the knowledge that they have created and shared, I live
in a different culinary world from my parents. I love inviting lots of friends to our
house on a Saturday night to cook for them. We never quite know who’s coming.
We have no courses, no menu, no start and no end. It’s absolutely not a dinner party.
My parents held and went to dinner parties; my generation cooks for each other.
In this same way I love what Irini Papadimitriou has been doing for the last five years
at London Design Festival. Her Digital Design Weekend has been an open invitation
for all of us to explore our digital future in a new and personal way.
I first got involved three years ago when Irini invited the Bespoke Project to
showcase work and talk to the public about our research in public digital design.
I then invited Irini to come to hack events we were running with the Met Office and
Mozilla and things started to grow very quickly. In the same way as friends turn up on
a Saturday night and start to stretch out chapati and help make dinner, Digital Design
Weekend is an open process for getting involved in any way that people want to.
For one person it might be about rolling up their sleeves, adjusting the temperature
on a soldering iron and attaching a motor to the hem of a dress, for another it might
be talking to a designer about an object they’ve made or joining a panel discussion
on the future of broadcasting to objects in our homes. This varied and open way of
sharing knowledge and calling people to action is something that I find wonderfully
engaging and incredibly optimistic.
With this way of working in mind, we wanted to put together a collection of works
that helped tell the story of what Digital Design Weekend is and what the future
of our digital might be. We have content from the Arts and Humanities Research
Council community (a huge thank you to Andrew Prescott), from BBC R&D, the Met
Office, Microsoft Research, Penguin Random House, Uniform and the V&A. You’ll find
a huge variety of thought pieces and calls-to-action that explore what people are
making with and thinking about what digital is and what the future of digital might
hold. Did you know that the Met Office has been collecting messages from bottles
for nearly two hundred years? Did you know that Microsoft are making physical pie
charts? Has it ever occurred to you that your daughter’s toy Dalek might
be connected to the web?
This book, a bit like dinner on a Saturday night at my house, has no particular order,
doesn’t adhere to any convention, is a little bit messy and absolutely unfinished.
Stick around and you might be here to tidy up if you’re not careful.
Welcome to our perspective on digital…
Jon Rogers, Professor of Creative Technology, the University of Dundee
IntroductionJon Rogers
Digital. Physical. Value.
What is digital to you and me? Where does it exist in our world? How does it exist in
our lives right now and more importantly, how might it exist in our lives in the future?
Beyond the apps and devices, the trends on social media and the way we watch
TV, for me an important thing to try and capture, try and wrestle with, is the
consideration: what impact will digital have on the way that you and I go
about our daily lives?
The parallel between digital and our weather is a good place to start. Like the wind,
digital is directly unseen but the visibility of impact is huge. And like the weather,
we tend to speculate and consider what digital is doing. Is my phone spying on me?
Has someone hacked my account? Does my boss know how much time I spend on
Twitter when I’m meant to be doing the accounts? The web, the Internet, its data,
our data, apps, applications, the cloud, the crowd, social media and privacy – it’s
all about us. It’s reaches into every part of our lives – and yet it does this from the
ubiquity of digital that is currently ‘safely’ locked behind our screens.
At least for now…
Yet this truce with the web is about to break. With the promise of the ‘Internet of
Things’ (which I prefer to think of as a web with things), we are faced with an exciting
new world where pretty much any object can be connected to the web. Think for
a minute just how much more impact digital will have when it breaks the confines
of a screen we have to turn on to use. For good or for bad, we have to consider that
the future of digital and all that it promises is a very human thing – from being part
of an interconnected worldwide network to being a very personal experience.
It is this personal and human lens on digital that I’m excited about, and to try and
make sense of it all, I think there is the question of value. For me, value lies beneath
all that we do. We make value based decisions that are the code to culture, society
and ultimately the world that you’re reading this page in. It is this underlying sense
of digital value that Digital Design Weekend at the V&A is attempting to explore.
By bringing together a wide and diverse collection of practitioners, thinkers and
makers, Digital Design Weekend creates a temporary space for exploration where
the public is as much a part as the people and work on show.

4. Jon Rogers Introduction
Being at Digital Design Weekend
Something very exciting happens when a citywide event gains the kind of global
traction that London Design Festival has done. When this energy of possibilities is
channelled through a world-class museum such as the V&A you arrive at something
rather special. In the globally connected world we all play within, having a focussed
physical place for activity is very important. Which is where we find the Digital Design
Weekend, which acts as both an arrival point for great work and a departure point
for incredible new thinking. Seeing how this has evolved with LDF over the last five
years illustrates just how important an event it is.
We Don’t Know What The Digital Future Is
Nobody knows what the digital future is going to be. No one knows who or what
are going to be the ideas and people influencing and shaping this future. People
from many walks of life and many skills can and will make the digital future the way
they want. I often wonder what would have happened if storytellers, playwrights,
and performers had been at the heart of the development of radio and television
technology; would there be a very different language of interaction? Would we still
have channels? Would we tune into a show? Or something entirely different, perhaps
more human? I’d love to see a furniture designer working with iTunes or Dropbox to
collaboratively make a more human system for storing our digital books, music and
films. I’d love to see a jeweller work with content providers to find how to create
personal content. After all, it took a jeweller, Johannes Guttenberg, to revolutionise
the book world and completely change how books were printed and distributed.
The reason being that the physical world stores more than the content it carries.
A book is an object that not only stores the content on a page, it holds within it
the human act of reading. A radio or TV might broadcast content, but they both
also store social rituals of family time, personal time and shared experiences.
Beneath all of this is the underlying principle that objects directly and indirectly
capture and re-play the values of the inventors, designers and makers that created
them. By curating Digital Design Weekend, Irini is curating a shared knowledge
and shared value in objects - a collective knowledge and collective value that
goes beyond each piece to form something new.
Collaborative Making
Exploring values demands a highly participative approach. It needs people to be
sharing knowledge, ideas and viewpoints together. We’ve all seen how collective
values can be both a powerful force for good alongside a banal representation of
institutionalised thinking at its worst! To understand and harness the latent capacity
within digital value, we need to do this in an open and collaborative way. In recent
years hackathons have started to gain popularity as ways of bringing people together
to solve problems in a shared space. I’m a little critical of what this means, because
in the main this involves people being taken out of everyday life and everyday
activities and placed in a closed space, often working through the night in secret
teams. I don’t think this is particularly productive, and although often with great
intentions, I’m left with a sense that potential for radical ideas and thinking is never
quite achieved and that openness is sometimes left the other side of a closed door.
I much prefer to think of this process as Collaborative Making, where it is more
integrated into people’s lives in a manageable way; that you can have connected
events and spaces that ideas and activities progress through. Our museums being
at the heart of this is a very cool proposition. The idea that the future could come
from collaborative public events that anyone can take part in - going beyond the
hackathon community and into something more human - is very much a part of
what Digital Design Weekend is trying to do. By challenging our existing familiarity
with the processes of our digital suppliers we will create all sorts of problems in
terms of ownership and intellectual property. This might mean we all have to take
a bit more responsibility to increase our digital literacy, bearing in mind that digital
literacy might not be about writing code; it might be about understanding citizenship
or tone-of-voice, historical analysis, publishing or identity. It could mean that digital
literacy cuts through everything we think we know.
With the public drawn into Irini and the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend there is
a real opportunity to raise the debate on what our digital future is, how we might
all get involved and just how important a diverse community of makers really is.
It is events like this that point to a future where the Internet could be in everything,
where data can be collected everywhere and when jewellers, historians, ceramicists,
performers, writers, scientists and coders are joining forces. It is personally how
I’d love to see tomorrow’s world, being collaboratively explored in a museum that
accelerates and then collides the past with the shape of things to come.
Things are about to get rather interesting...

5. Reclaiming Charts: of Physicality and Small Data
These days ‘Big Data’ is a big issue. From our daily newspapers to new scientific
journals and from TV and radio to blogs, the proliferation of data and the
proliferation of new techniques for grappling with that data is presented as a new
horizon in our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of the world we
live in. These datasets are vast and varied: census results, local statistics on crime,
education, property prices, our shopping habits, our tweets and Facebook likes,
scientific measurements, etc. If we are to believe the hype, these data sets and
more besides, are enabling unprecedented access to who we are as individuals
and citizens, what we want, and even the very nature of knowledge.
But with each new advance in the amount of data we can glean, store, analyse and
present, the questions we seem to pose of our datasets and the techniques we use
to find and present our answers become increasingly removed from the everyday
experiences of data and our naïve ways of understanding it.
To redress the gap between the promises of the Big Data paradigm and the
day-to-day experience of the data, we have been working with a local community
to understand what the idea of ‘data’ means to people and what they hope it might
be able to do for them. The street running next to our lab in Cambridge, Tenison
Road, runs from Cambridge Station up towards Anglia Ruskin University; it is this
community, a community we at Microsoft Research form a part of, who we are
working with to comprehend these everyday understandings of data, ‘small data’
if you will.
Several classes of data emerge as important in the community. There is data that
helps us negotiate better facilities and protect our environment. Traffic volume and
speed, for example, is of particular concern at present to this community. Similarly
measuring the effect that traffic and building projects have on air quality indicators
provides data that is useful in discussions with the council about local traffic
calming provisions.
Another interesting set of data points are those that help us tell stories about the
places we live. Residents have been working with us to collect a historic archive
of the street; we have also been looking at mapping as a way to record textured
local knowledge.
Then there are the questions we would like to pose of each other. Questions relating
to local issues like the provisioning of new street signs through to pragmatic issues
like borrowing a ladder, or questions that help to paint a picture of the space
a community lives in, like which garden gets the first snowdrop. To facilitate these
questions within our project we have designed a device that residents can use
to both pose and answer questions. We have conceived and built this as a small,
Microsoft ResearchTim Regan — David Sweeney

6. Microsoft Research
dedicated device, though much of the functionality could readily be achieved within
a web page or a smartphone app. Instead, creating a physical artefact allows us to
keep the relationship between us and our data in the foreground during the project.
With big or with small data the techniques that we use to look at the information
are crucial in prescribing exactly what we can learn from and do with data. These
techniques may be designed to help us discover things within the data: trends,
patterns or answers to questions we have posed; or they may be designed to help
us tell stories about or using the data. Some of these techniques in use are very old,
the first pie chart for example can be traced to 1801, and some are cutting edge
inventions, such as those used to visualise bioinformatics data. One benefit of such
advances is that increasingly complex data can be examined, but one drawback
is that the charts themselves become less legible and the preserve of data experts.
Simple charts become almost too commonplace and fail to stand out.
One way beyond this dilemma is to stay true to the simplicity of charting ideas like
pie charts and line graphs, but render them physically rather than presenting them
on screen or in print. The presence of such charts makes them stand out and helps
us to present the data we are collecting with residents back into the community,
where the data is of interest.
Tim Regan — David Sweeney

7. BBC R&D
Introduction
The future is here. Our lives have become intricately woven digital timelines.
We used to listen to stories around the campfire, now we bask in the glow of
the touchscreen. Online data transactions are the protagonists, and every
gesture counts, steering this compelling and ever-shifting drama. Information
is our currency, but we haven’t worked out the exchange rate, not yet
harnessing the power of authoring our own digital storylines.
Like all the best technologies, the web can be used to both enlighten and enslave.
This is the tale of two futures. One where we blindly offer ourselves as data-mines,
serving and supporting a handful of towering economic machines, and transversely,
where we inhabit a future of isolation, disconnected from services and struggling
to navigate and share information.
How do we mediate them and shape an open Internet we actually want to exist?
What role does media take? Where does a public service broadcaster fit in the
vision of an open web?
There is a creeping sense within the upper echelons of the technology glitterati
that soon everything we touch will turn to Internet gold, with an ‘Internet of Things’
blanket that connects all animate and inanimate objects (and maybe, just maybe,
we’ll get those jet-packs we’ve been promised.) But it will happen. Of course we’ll
falter at first and have to re-think the infrastructure, but it’s no joke to imagine our
children living in connected homes, playing with toys that can identify them and read
them bedtime stories. It seems we’re stumbling into this, without truly considering
the ethical implications of making everyone and everything connected.
Ian Forrester
Ian is a well-known and likeable character on the digital scene in the UK.
He has now made Manchester his home, where he works for the BBC’s R&D
north lab. He focusses on open innovation and new disruptive opportunities via
open engagement and collaborations with start-ups, early adopters and hackers.
His current research is into the area of Future Narrative and Storytelling.
A new method of broadcasting, a technology he calls Perspective Media, pairs
the best of broadcast with the best of the Internet to create an experience akin
to sitting around a campfire telling stories. Interestingly, this also crosses over
into the ‘Internet of Things.’
Ian Forrester

8. BBC R&D
Jasmine Cox
Jasmine is a Product Designer with BBC R&D’s user experience group in the North.
With a background in Product Design from the University of Dundee, Jasmine has
expertise across electronic, industrial, and mechanical design. She crafts playful
devices and builds control systems to connect them to the Internet. Jasmine
specialises in blending digital experiences with analogue interactions and objects.
Her work with BBC R&D weaves together storytelling and tangible objects
to enchanting effect.
Perceptive Radio
Perceptive Radio combines the notion of the ‘Internet of Things’ with perceptive
technology (sensing, insight and algorithms) to bring home good old-fashioned
immersive storytelling. It is a networked object that can deliver tailored media
experiences sympathetic to domestic environments, without being disruptive
or jarring.
Being a physical but networked object gives it presence, tangible and more real
than a laptop playing the same content. The radio deceives by being an enchanted
object in your home, watching and recognising the audience’s mood and reaction
to content it plays. The changes are subtle and easily missed, rather than abrupt
changes that would take the audience out of the immersion. The radio throws
up a ton of interesting ethical questions while sitting there watching you.
Playlister Fob
We’ve all been there; you hear an inspirational piece of music, a gem from Radio 6
Music - unlike anything you’ve heard before, or yet another classic comedy revelation
on the R1 Breakfast Show. It’s a moment of broadcast you want to cherish forever,
learn more about and share with friends. But you’re driving, or your hands are busy
with the washing-up. You tell yourself to remember it, but by the time you get round
to looking it up on your phone, it’s gone…
Radio has an implicitly active audience. It has natural advantages in that it’s live,
personal and mobile, with strengths in the live experience, connectivity and
topicality. However experiences with radio whilst driving are exclusively a one-way
deal; 21 million people each week listen to the BBC in their vehicles, but can’t easily
interact with their favourite station. Imagine that in one touch you could save that
moment, simply and effectively, so you could access and share it later.
Ian Forrester

9. BBC R&DIan Forrester
BBC R&D are developing Playlister Fobs, small, single-touch buttons that work with
the BBC’s music service, Playlister, to save moments of broadcast. These fobs can
be used when listening to any of the six networks currently served by BBC Playlister,
on any live platform (FM, DAB, online streamed.)
Your Fob is a handy nomadic button; it can follow you wherever you go,
ensuring you don’t need to find your phone to save that exceptional song.
This research will drive understanding of:
—— The scope for media interactions beyond ‘the four screens’
—— The utility of small control devices as connected products v app
—— Linking older technologies (FM/ DAB Radio) with online content
—— Connecting audiences to their beloved radio stations in new ways
—— Further work into networked controllers and their role in our lives
The Physical Playlist
The Physical Playlists machine is a physical-digital object that people would share
with significant others and friends.
‘Mix tapes’ were a thing of love, a physical object people would share with important
people in their lives. They were naturally a social object and highly representative of
a person’s identity. The knowledge of the effort involved by the giver in selecting the
songs and sitting through each one was also part of the symbolism for the receiver.
Objects can be generated from the media you ‘teach’ them, or existing objects
shaped by how you play (embed) media into them. Thus the modern mix tape could
become a linked series of small objects like lucky charms, physically shareable in
forms representing the tracks they contain. The Physical Playlists Machine is based
on the idea that physical items often mean more to us as physical beings and intends
to add a level of exclusivity and personalisation to the sharing process. Considering
trans-platform engagement and the ability to engage users and viewers in
co-creating media, it is suggested that this may present as a new modality for
user co-creation and curation. We now live in a world where when a young person
is asked how some technology works, they’re more likely to mistake the question for
‘how do I use it?’ We turn to teenagers to tell us how to use what are now everyday
objects, without considering how this stuff got here, how it actually works, and what
happens next. That’s why the world needs hackers. Every business needs hackers;
every government needs hackers. Hackers learn through making, through exploring
new technology, through repurposing.
The Physical Playlist was designed with BBC R&D in collaboration with the AHRC
Knowledge Exchange Hub The Creative Exchange.

10. Met Office Hacking Journey
In 2012 a small number of Met Office staff who had experienced hackathons and
similar events collaborated with NASA to bring their vision of a global weekend
of hacking to the UK. The result was the first International Space Apps Challenge.
When you’ve been part of an event across 17 countries and including over 2,000
participants, you don’t want the fun to end there.
Space Apps is now a regular annual event for a growing community. For many
participants it’s often their first hackathon, and as with the Met Office in 2012,
many organisations are hosting a hackathon for the first time. Events range in size
from a dozen participants to well over a hundred. Total participation in 2014 was
over 8,000 at 95 venues.
Memory of the Weather
The Met Office is working to provide online access to its archive of electronic data.
This new archive complements the existing archive of paper records. Together
they will form a seamless ‘Nation’s memory of the weather’. With the work being
undertaken to prepare for the implementation of the digital archive, the Met Office
saw an opportunity to bring to the V&A a small selection of materials to illustrate
some of the stories their records can help to tell.
The Met Office, originally known as the Meteorological Office, was founded in 1854
under the leadership of Admiral Fitzroy. Its initial purpose was not to forecast but
to seek to understand the world’s oceans in order to support British Trade and to
improve the safeguarding of life and property at sea. After the sinking of the Royal
Charter in 1859, which resulted in the loss of over 800 lives, Fitzroy fought for
permission to introduce a Storm Warning Service. The warning service, launched
in 1861, became the first national forecasting service in the world. Later that year
Fitzroy established a weather forecast published in national newspapers, but at the
time this was seen very much as a sideline because the public might be interested.
From these early origins the Office expanded rapidly and has adapted and changed
with developments in science, communication and technology. The archive is a vast
treasure trove of information and houses both the Met Office collection and the
archives of the Royal Meteorological Society. Indeed if you were to put the used
shelves end to end they would reach 4.5 times the height of Ben Nevis. The records
we hold range from bottle messages used to track ocean currents through to the
very first forecast, charts and daily weather summaries. We have ship logs, private
weather diaries stretching back to the late 1600s, the original Beaufort Scale, daily
registers and other types of observation data, expedition data including records
from the ill fated Scott Polar expedition and a rare book collection, including our
Met OfficeMike Saunby

11. Met Office
‘Hún ferðaðist eins langt og hún gat á landi or fór yfir frosin sjó til að
rannsaka meira, enn samt án arangurs.’
An extract of the Icelandic version of the story,
written by Taggart Smith, Scotland.
‘Elle regarda sous les eaux, où elle trouva leurs cousins. Mais cela n’était
pas suffisant, elle savait déjà que les narvals existaient!’
An extract of the French version of the story,
written by Nathalü Vladis, Greece.
‘Once there was a stubborn little girl, whose favourite animal was the unicorn.
She knew they existed because she’d seen a unicorn horn hanging on a museum
wall when she was three (as we all know, three year olds are never mistaken!)’
The beginning of the first version of the story, written collaboratively
by Martha Sedgwick and pupils Sophia, Tom and Oliver, UK.
Mike Saunby
earliest item - a manuscript dating from c.1290. We are working to increase access
to the archive collections by digitising some of the treasures from our document
collections and we hope that this work will further complement the digital archive.
The Explorable Story Project
Martha Sedgwickk
The Explorable Story Project started as part of Space Apps 2013 as a way to take
a group of primary school children to a hackathon, but is proof that the projects
begun in hackathons don’t end at the deadline. Having no coding experience,
we decided to take a beginner’s approach to hacking - using modelling clay.
Originally, the story was going to be an interactive picture book, with simple
animations, to introduce young children to science and exploration, but the lure
of playing with modelling clay caused more people to join the team locally and
translators joined from all over the world. The possibilities of collaboration
expanded our thinking and by the end of the weekend, the first version of the
story was available in 17 different languages. When we were discussing the
variations of the story due to cultural differences, the team realised that the
project had potential to do a whole lot more.
We hope to use STEM as a way to connect young children around the world by
sharing the work they produce in response to learning about an area of science
and exploration. The project is now building up a free database of STEM (Science,
Technology, Engineering and Maths) exploration pages, which give explanations of
people, places and activities in child-friendly language that is also translated into
as many languages as possible to make it accessible to as many children as we can.
So far the project has taken us, with the support of the Met Office, to hack at the
V&A Digital Futures exhibition and Mozfest 2013. We have also attended the UNAWE
workshop 2013, ‘Astronomy to Inspire’ and ‘Educate Young Children’ where we
worked with a group of German kindergarteners to create clay models and stories,
and astronomy outreach specialists to gain better understanding of ways to help
young children learn about space.
‫وا‬ ‫شیب‬ ‫زا‬ ‫هتشذگ‬ ‫راک‬ ‫درک‬ ‫و‬ ‫تیاهن‬ ‫ششالت‬ ‫ار‬ ‫درک‬ ‫ات‬ ‫هکنیا‬ ‫یزور‬ ‫راوس‬ ‫رب‬ ‫کشوم‬ ‫ییاضف‬ ‫دوخ‬ ‫دش‬ ‫و‬ ‫'هب‬
‘.‫رفس"هام‬ ‫طقف.درک‬ ‫یارب‬ ‫هکنیا‬ ‫نانیمطا‬ ‫ادیپ‬ ‫دنک‬ ‫بسا‬ ‫یرادخاش‬ ‫اجنآ‬ ‫تسین‬
An extract of the story in Farsi,
written by Narges Rasouli, Iran.

12. Met OfficeMike Saunby
Genevieve and Her Dancers
[arra]stre is a digital, data-driven dance performance that derives its movements
and concepts from computer science theory. The performance will break down
certain theories and concepts through the movement of ballet. [arra]stre will
include data visualisation, images influenced and triggered by data from the
student dancers, wearable technology and the choreography itself. This work
is a collaboration between readysaltedcode CIC, industry experts and Battle
Abbey School Students.
This project has been funded by Arts Council England, grants for the arts
and Google’s RISE award for Computer Science Education.
The project aims to increase understanding and reduce people’s fear of the subject
of computer science. Specifically, it attempts to increase the frequency people
engage with technology, and deepen their understanding. The choreography
reinterprets computer science theory from the new Computing Program of Study
in England into dance form. The visualisations have been developed using web
technologies such as JavaScript and D3 library, along with the use of wearable
technology. Data collection from the dancers will use a variety of devices from
the Kinect to wearable Arduinos.
The choreography was created by Dr Paul Golz, Creative Director of Ephemeris.
Paul lectures in both Computer Science and Dance at the University of Worcester.
Prior to this Paul was a physicist at CERN. Paul was joined on this project by
Camilla Neale, an experienced choreographer.
Data visualisations was commissioned for the ballet and created by Peter Cook.
Kinect code written by Alex Shaw from Glastonbridge Software.

13. Design and designers have always played with and shaped the world around
them. Charles and Ray Eames showed the world just how agile, flexible and
relevant design is across every part of our lives: from what we sit on, to how
we learn, to what technology can do, to how we understand the vastness of
the universe and the minuteness of the cells in our body. Their activity spanned
a world in change in the post world war II era. They understood global change.
And they understood design for global change.
Once again, we’re in an era of unprecedented change and evolution.
And we know that there has never been a time where creativity and design could
be more influential and more important. If we consider how the digital revolution
is changing the world from a push to a pull economy, and in turn our relationship
with how data is created, shared and understood, then the case for design is
potentially staggering. It provides us with exciting opportunities for creatives to
start to shape this new world through considered creative practice. It provides
a whole new playground for what designers can do in the digital world. With this
in mind, we’d like to share two projects that in different ways start to show what
we believe is the future landscape where creativity, technology and innovation
collide, and where agencies like Uniform play a role in imagining the future.
In our everyday work, and more specifically through our R&D platform, we are
constantly looking at what the future looks like, and in this case exploring new
ways of connecting brands with consumers. Martin Skelly, Creative Technologist,
talks to Prof Jon Rogers at the University of Dundee, to explore how we can bring
the physical web closer to the clients we work with.
Nick Howe, Uniform.
Can light call us to Twitter?
Jon — “The pioneer of Design Thinking, Tim Brown, says many clever things.
One of the cleverest is: “Thomas Edison created the electric light bulb and then
wrapped an entire industry around it. Edison understood that the bulb was little
more than a parlour trick without a system of electric power generation and
transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.” What’s not to be
marvelled at with the creation of artificial light? The beauty and powerful magic
of a light draws us in. What must it have been like to see electric light for the first
time? We are now facing a similar revolution in what a light bulb could be. What
happens when a light bulb is connected to the Internet? As soon as it does,
it changes from a light to a pixel. It follows that if we are controlling a light with
a computer then it becomes a pixel that we can write behaviours to. Which means
that we can harness light’s ability to connect us to new things. If we can do this,
can we connect a light to the Internet and then have a pixel that responds to
social media? Can a light call us to Twitter?
UniformMartin Skelly — Jon Rogers

14. Uniform
Calling ahead or hoping that they will have wired Ethernet isn’t ideal, so we ruled this
out. When we started exploring wi-fi, we knew that building the one-off prototype
would be relatively cost effective with Arduino. However we knew from previous
projects that unit costs and development time would spiral if we wanted to scale
the project up in the future.”
You thought that this was a perfect project for playing with the
Electric Imp. Why?
Jon — “What I love about the Imp is that it provides a prototyping platform that is
a direct link to a marketable product. Which means that although you can treat it
as prototyping platform for playing with ideas, you can also use it as a delivery
platform if one of those ideas starts to head down a potential mass-market route.
I love Arduino. It’s amazing. But one of the limitations is that it’s very hard to go from
an experience prototype or concept model to anything more than a one-off.
There is no data model behind it. There is no direct way of connecting it to the
web and providing a web-service to power it. There is a very long runway between
concept and product. With the Imp that runway is very short; they have the business
models in place to enable you to have a data-enabled product connecting to
the web. They have the supply chains in place to make that happen if you want
to release a product. That is a very seductive proposition. But actually, that’s
just half of the story.
What I love is the technical platform. How shall I say this in a simple way? It’s
basically a platform that is super easy to connect an object (let’s say a light) and
have its behaviour controlled over the web. It’s super easy to create a pixel from
an LED (or collection of LEDs) that is both programmable (you program the Imp to
dim the LED over the web and it dims the LED, over the web.) But that’s not all.
You can also have it connect to another cloud-based server that allows the web
to control the light, over the web. You can do a whole load of cloud-based
heavy-duty processing that then talks to the light over the web and does
complex and beautiful things.
The Making of Weather Systems
Weather, the ‘Internet of Things’, Micronetworks and Utopian Socialism.
Recently, we’ve been exploring some of the different hardware platforms that are
enabling the creation of connected devices and spearheading the development
of the ‘Internet of Things’. We aim to make devices that are easy to understand,
practical and enjoyable to use, and we wanted to explore how we could extend the
network of designers, researchers and craftspeople we work with to develop our
ideas into demonstrators and ultimately products. With all that in mind we decided
to work with Studio PSK to develop a series of connected devices that could
Martin Skelly — Jon Rogers
What meaning can we take from a twitter-connected pixel?
Martin — “One thing I’ve been thinking about is how would it feel to glance into
a data cable that is powering a Twitter conversation? What could each of these
tweets zapping around cyberspace actually look like? I also wanted to explore
a sector that Uniform already completes a lot of work in – sport. We already work
with The FA and Liverpool Football Club. I wanted to combine match day excitement
with ‘Internet of Things’ geekery. Football grounds have a completely unique
atmosphere on match days, but for days before and after matches, the beautiful
game is the topic of millions of individual contributors on social media. We wanted
to explore these colossal metrics, to visualise the social media buzz in between
matches. It’s a bit like standing outside a stadium on match day – hearing the chants,
and the near misses, and the goals - but you are staring into the depths of an online
conversation instead.
A large number of people discussing a certain subject or theme can act as an early
warning indicator of immediate, big news. We’ve called the project Kixl, a mash up
of kick, and pixel. Kixl is a physical object that visualises the number of tweets on
a certain hashtag with simple colour changes. At its simplest, Kixl is a glanceable
object that tells us the state of a specific conversation on Twitter, the same way
that we use a clock as our visual check-in with time.
What are your thoughts on the meaning that physical pixels can provide?
Jon — “Think about it. A light bulb. All pervasive and everywhere. Could they subtly
inform us that our morning bus is delayed? Could they excite us that our bid on
Ebay is approaching a crunch point? Could they relax us that granny’s gone to
bed safely? What would you want a light to be if it was a pixel? The meaning really
is extraordinarily broad, scalable and writeable in any direction. And as creative
technologists, it’s a great space to play in.”
And now for the techie bit. How did you bring it to life?
Martin — “I began by using an Arduino and some high voltage RGB LED strips to
experiment with light behaviours and get the colour balances right. For a design as
simple as Kixl, it’s important that each part looks amazing. So before touching Twitter
or hooking the device up to the web, I explored the design of the casing and the
layout of the LEDs with dummy data. I needed maximum daylight brightness but
a wide viewing angle to allow groups of people to be able to glance at the device.
When I was happy with the design, I started exploring methods for getting it
connected to the Internet. Arduino Ethernet shields are my go to treatment as
they are extremely reliable, but can be clunky when taking it out to client meetings.

15. Uniform — Studio PSKPete Thomas — Patrick Stevenson Keating
provide localised real time weather forecasts, powered by BergCloud.
It’s commonly held belief that the British are preoccupied by the weather and
according to research, 70% of the UK population check the weather forecast
at least once a day. The popularity of weather app downloads around the world
illustrate that the weather is a global common denominator, and reports indicate
that checking the weather is the most frequent activity of smart phone users and
one of the first things that we do in the morning. The challenge for us was whether
a connected device could improve on this experience by taking the data off the
screen and translating it into physical behaviours. In particular we were keen to
think about how the objects could express some of the whimsy and playfulness
we associate with the British obsession with weather whilst maintaining a visual
aesthetic that suggested scientific rigour, accuracy and trust.
There are three devices that forecast rainfall, temperature and wind. One aspect
of the devices that got us particularly excited was the ability to use existing APIs
and weather data to accurately forecast the next 10 minutes of weather and provide
extreme weather alerts. The design of the apps was a collaboration between Uniform
and Studio PSK. In the case of the Rain device, both were keen to simulate the sound
of rain through a mechanical system, Pete Explains:
“We looked at loads of different options, things like rain sticks and the drums they
use to make rain sound effects for radio, but we couldn’t get the sound right.
In the end we settled for something a little more abstract, but visually engaging.”
The pins that pop out from the top of the Rain System are meant to resemble rain
splashing up from a puddle. The ‘puddle’ is a thin metal plate. When a rain alert
is detected a grid of solenoids activates the pins. Each solenoid pushes a pin
against the plate creating a sound. Collectively it illustrates the intensity of
the imminent rain.
The design of the temperature System drew inspiration from the silent monitors
used by Robert Owen, a utopian social reformer of the 1800s. Silent monitors
were used to enforce discipline without recourse to violence at the New Lanark
Mills in Scotland. Pete explains the connection:
“I’d seen these monitors years ago and they were lodged in the back of my mind as
being a really good example of glanceable communication. They typify the simple
behaviours we associate with connected devices that are used by multiple people
in shared spaces. The Silent Monitor was a small wooden block with 4 coloured
faces. Each face could be used to describe the behaviour of the mill workers with
each colour representing a different type of behaviour ranging from Excellent to Bad.
In the same way, our System uses 4 colours to convey at a glance what the ‘feels like’
temperature will be ranging from: ‘Below 5 degrees’ to ‘Over 20 degrees’. It’s the
simple kind of information that might dictate whether you choose to wear shorts,
grab a coat or wrap up with scarf and gloves.”

16. YourFry : A Meeting of Text and Technology
Autobiography is about memory – the representation and interpretation of
memories. These memories are selected and constructed into a narrative of
the author’s choosing. This is a subjective process, where the author makes
themselves the subject of their storytelling. The publisher’s role is to give this
shape and a form – physical and digital – and then to take it to the wider world,
to amplify it.
Stephen Fry and Penguin’s YourFry project has been created to ask questions
about the nature of how we create and publish autobiography in the digital
environment. The web is responsive, interactive and chaotic – what if the
conventional autobiography is thrown open to the web? What might the
results look like; what form might they take?
Following our award-winning 2010 app, MyFry, we are again working with the
inimitable Stephen Fry to launch YourFry – an interactive, collaborative global
project to reinterpret the words and life story of Stephen’s brand new memoir,
More Fool Me.
Through samples of text, audio, imagery and metadata taken from More Fool Me
(as well as The Fry Chronicles), we invite participants at venues the world over –
previewing at London’s Victoria and Albert museum on September 21st, 2014
– to create something innovative and new from Stephen’s tale of success, excess,
addiction and depression (with added slatherings of shameless name-dropping.)
In allowing Stephen’s memoir – his own interpretation of certain key events in his life
– to be reinterpreted by others, we will explore how storytelling continues to evolve
in the digital age. And in breaking down the barrier between author and audience,
creator and consumer, traditional publishing at last acknowledges that texts are
no longer static, but have become flexible, adaptable and, in new ways, alive.
As each interpretation occurs around the globe so different cultural influences –
language, geography, history, political and social concerns – will generate and
shape different stories from the raw matter of Stephen’s life: his personal story
will become global, multifaceted. Individual tastes and influences will breed
unique, original interpretations.
Participants are then invited to upload their creations to a website to be viewed,
listened to or interacted with by a potential global audience of millions. We welcome
ideas in any language and form, for example: text, data visualisation, interactive
web format, app, audio, film, photographic, animation, 3D-models, live events
and experiences. The only limits will be the ingenuity of the participants.
Penguin Random House UKHarriet Foster — Nathan Hull

17. Penguin Random House UK
The culmination of this series of events and global collaborations will see an
esteemed panel of experts from publishing, gaming, tech, film and more, recognise
and announce outstanding submissions across a variety of disciplines. To enter,
creative individuals, groups, organisations, innovation labs, tech hubs, libraries
and universities should download assets from YourFry.com, available from launch
on September 25th.
We at Penguin believe nothing this intimate and personal has been launched on such
a global scale before – a very private-public art project for everyone in the world to
get involved in.
As Stephen Fry – logophile and technophile – says of the challenge: “Be bold,
brave and brilliant in creating your own versions of my story. There are no rules:
this challenge depends on you. Make of me whatever you will.”
Harriet Foster — Nathan Hull

18. Andrew Prescott
Re-making the Humanities
Computers developed from the wish to expedite the mundane, to complete
repetitive, boring tasks more quickly and accurately. Charles Babbage dreamed
of a ‘difference engine’ because he thought that machines would make a better
job of calculating and printing mathematical tables than humans. Humanities
scholars began using computers when a catholic priest, Roberto Busa, struggled
to create an index of the works of Thomas Aquinas and wondered if IBM could help.
Our engagement with computers is now moving beyond such utilitarian beginnings,
and we can more easily appreciate how the poet Richard Brautigan could view
computers as ‘machines of loving grace’ and ‘flowers with spinning blossoms’.
The electronic records of President George W. Bush deposited in his Presidential
Library comprise over 80 terabytes of data (to give an idea of scale, all the printed
books in the Library of Congress represent about 50 terabytes of data.) The e-mail
archive of the Bush administration contains over 200 million e-mails. In order for
historians to analyse 200 million e-mails, they need new tools, skills and methods
- possibly even a new historical imagination. Simply reading or searching is not
powerful enough to understand and interpret so many messages; we need to mine,
link, visualise and quantify. Moreover, old-fashioned books and articles are not
a good way to describe scholarly explorations of such huge data resources. Instead,
we need scholarship that is more data-driven, visual and interactive. Researching
an archive like that of President Bush will be a visual, haptic, and interactive process,
so that writing history becomes more like playing a video game. We are used to the
results of historical or literary research being presented in textual form, but the
rise of large data sets and quantitative methods mean that increasingly, humanities
researchers require a strong visual and design sense.
The ways in which arts and humanities researchers are engaging with new
technologies are the focus of research funded by the Digital Transformations theme
of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC.) The AHRC is a government
body sponsored, like other members of Research Councils UK, by the Department
for Business, Innovation and Skills. The AHRC funds and facilitates research into the
arts and humanities, and each year uses approximately £98 million of public funds to
provide some 700 research awards, 2,000 postgraduate scholarships, and numerous
Knowledge Transfer Awards. Digital Transformations is one of four current AHRC
strategic themes. Projects funded by the Digital Transformations theme explore how
engagement with digital methods is changing the aims, practice and dissemination
of research in the arts and humanities. They also provide arts and humanities
perspectives on major social and cultural questions posed by digital technologies
in areas such as identity, intellectual property and cyber security.
Work undertaken through the Digital Transformations theme ranges from
investigations of changing patterns of reading and publishing through to
visualisations of translations of Shakespeare. The various approaches
AHRC
encompassed by the theme are reflected by its three largest projects. ‘Digital
Panopticon’ (www.digitalpanopticon.org) links data from criminal trials held at the
Old Bailey in London with data concerning the settlement of Australia in order to
explore the lives of over 66,000 people sentenced at the Old Bailey between 1780
and 1875, and shows how techniques of linking datasets and data visualisations
can transform historical research. The second large project, ’Fragmented
Heritage’ (www.fragmentedheritage.com), will use automated processing of
images and crowdsourcing to increase dramatically the scale and speed with
which archaeologists can investigate large sites and whole landscapes. Finally,
‘Transforming Musicology’ (www.transforming-musicology.org) examines how
our ability to automatically process and manipulate music changes our approach
to the study of (for example) lute music or Wagner’s operas.
A fundamental component of digital transformation is the way in which familiar
cultural categorisations of form are being eroded. Images, texts, music, film and
artefacts are now represented and distributed in digital form, and can be mixed
and mashed. This merging of cultural forms challenges the intellectual silos of
academic disciplines. Digital scholarship is inherently interdisciplinary and offers
humanities scholars and artists new opportunities for collaboration. Design will
be an important meeting ground, as can be seen from an AHRC funded project
at the University of Glasgow, ‘Mapping Metaphor’ (blogs.arts.gla.ac.uk/metaphor.)
The linguistic comparisons by which we describe ideas and feelings contain much
cultural information. By tracing how metaphors change through history, we can
create an archaeology of past mentalities. The ‘Mapping Metaphor’ project uses
the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary to create visualisations
of the historical development of human ideas and associations, showing how
design can help represent knowledge.
When work began on the Digital Transformations theme it seemed data was
becoming an evanescent quicksilver medium living in an ethereal cloud. But digital
transformations always wrong-foot you, and we have recently become more aware
of how the digital can become material. Digital materialities are another area where
design provides a meeting ground between arts and humanities. Some AHRC projects
are exploring how the ‘Internet of Things’ will reshape cultural engagement. For
example, ‘Tangible Memories’ (www.tangible-memories.com) at the University of
Bristol seeks to develop a sense of community and shared experience for residents
in care homes by co-operative exploration of their life stories. The project will
attach stories to objects that are personally meaningful to participants so that
they can remind themselves of important memories and share them with others.
A fascinating expression of digital materiality is the conductive ink produced by
companies such as Bare Conductive. Conductive inks enable circuits to be drawn
or painted, and drawings and paintings to become circuits. We have assumed that
‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ are antithetical, but conductive ink changes that.
A silkscreen print can become digital and interactive, as the YouTube video

19. Andrew Prescott AHRC
of Eduardo Kac’s beguiling ‘Lagoglyphic Sound System’ (2012) illustrates. Jon Rogers,
Mike Shorter and others at the Product Research Studio have shown how conductive
ink transforms paper into a flexible platform for digital products of all kinds, such as
paper headphones.
One of the most exciting activities I have undertaken as part of the AHRC Digital
Transformations theme was the presentation at the Cheltenham Science Festival
of ‘Contours’, an interactive sound sculpture using conductive ink by Fabio Lattanzi
Antinori with Bare Conductive and Alicja Pytlewska. (Fabio is presenting ‘Data Flags’,
another work using conductive ink, at the V&A during the Digital Design Weekend.)
‘Contours’ is a metaphor for the idea of breathing life into a textile skin, and consists
of interactive tapestries with capacitive sensors using conductive ink. As visitors
touch the tapestries, they modulate a data-driven ambient soundscape reminiscent
of a medical research environment. In ‘Contours’, Fabio uses new materials to
connect science, art and the humanities. This approach encapsulates the spirit
animating the AHRC’s work on Digital Transformations.
Andrew Prescott, AHRC Digital Transformations Theme Leader Fellow,
King’s College London.
Data Objects: Turning Data into Form
For many people outside the scientific community statistical information,
spreadsheets and graphs remain abstract and difficult to comprehend.
This research investigates how we might interpret complex technical/digital
information through the creation of physical objects, designed with the intention
of bringing better understanding and increased accessibility to scientific data
for a variety of non-specialist audiences.
In an AHRC funded pilot study, data gathered on the varying abilities of older people
to open ordinary domestic jar lids was used to design a number of physical data-
objects that represented this data in different ways. Some objects were created by
hand by artists/designers and others were created using computer-based modelling
and 3D printing technologies. A range of people with different interests in the data
were asked to interact with the objects and discuss which objects they thought
helped to communicate and add insight to the original information.
From the outset we have been interested in how a fusing of digital/material
practices, attributes and qualities could be used to explore not just new concepts
for digital technologies such as 3D digital printing and data visualisation, but also the
creation of hybrid constructs that borrow from the languages and conventions of
both digital and material cultures, and how these hybrid constructs might begin
to bring about shifts in expectations of the relationship between digital and
material paradigms and the ways in which these paradigms might work together.
The research also investigates how we might begin to use these constructs to
communicate information, ideas and concepts, taking into consideration the
operational and experiential expectations inherent in both digital and material
environments and artefacts. This allows for our interaction with digital data to
move beyond the confines of the computer screen into a located physical
experience, enriching the potential for the translation of knowledge.
However, the actualising of a digital data-set into a physical object may initially
seem paradoxical, since by fixing digital data in time and physical space we would
appear to disable much of the dynamic potential inherent in computer technologies.
One of the aims of this research was to question if these ‘concertised’ data-sets
might retain echoes of their digital origins and capabilities such as dynamism,
complexity, interconnectivity, mutability and so on, and to examine if by creating
a data-object we can begin to describe a set of possible relationships between the
digital traits described above and the material properties inherent in the physical
object, such as tactility and notions of uniqueness, preciousness, durability, history
and value, in both economic and socio-cultural terms.
Ian Gwilt, Professor in Design and Visual Communication,
The Art and Design Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University.
The Secret Life of a Weather Datum
Putting ‘big’ weather data in the spotlight, ‘The Secret Life of a Weather Datum’
project seeks to develop a new approach for understanding and communicating
how socio-cultural values and practices are articulated in the transformation of
weather data on its journey from production through to various contexts of ‘big
data’ collation, distribution and re-use.
The team are following a single temperature datum produced at the Weston Park
Weather Station in Sheffield. The station is one of the oldest weather stations in
the UK and is one that has made a significant contribution to the climatic record.
The team are following this datum on its journey through the Met Office, through
the governance structures which shape its journey, and on into two cases of
re-use: climate science and financial markets. They are also exploring the datum’s
intersection with data produced by amateur observers, including their own weather
station built using a Raspberry Pi, and citizen scientists involved in transcribing old
weather records that have been recovered and rescued from archives. At various
stages of the datum’s journey the team are collecting interview, observational,
photographic, digital ethnographic and documentary data relating to the
socio-cultural values and practices shaping the use and journey of the datum,
and analysing these in relation to the broader social context.
From this research an interactive website and research data archive is being
developed that allows users to follow the journey of the weather datum and

20. Digital Transformations
explore the socio-cultural values uncovered at various stages on this journey.
A visualisation of the journey is currently being developed that resembles a map
similar to that of the London Underground. Each station on the map will represent
an organisation, project or institution that the weather datum travels through, and
users will be able to enter the stations to explore the socio-cultural values and
practices uncovered by the research team in that location. The tracks on the map
connect each station, and offer a visualisation of the flows of data between stations.
This method of animating the research findings further develops the concept of
‘following the datum’ beyond being solely an approach to guide data collection into
a design-orientated process of documenting and preserving the motions and actions
of the weather data as it moves through different spaces.
Project Team: Jo Bates and Paula Goodale (University of Sheffield),
Yuwei Lin (University of the Creative Arts.)
The ACCORD Project: Co-producing our digital heritage
The ACCORD project is actively researching the opportunities and implications of
digitally modelling heritage places and objects with communities. Central to ACCORD
is the notion that the growing accessibility and ubiquity of digital technology means
that heritage can increasingly be created and recorded by everyone. The project’s
answer to the question ‘what is heritage?’ is entirely community defined, from rock
art to rock-climbing, and we encourage the participation of diverse groups across
Scotland. Working with visualisation technologists and community engagement
experts, community groups design and produce 3D models of heritage places
significant to them using techniques such as photogrammetry and Reflectance
Transformation Imaging. The results are then permanently archived so that they
are freely reusable by all. This process raises fascinating questions surrounding
co-production, value and the experience of authenticity in relation to these
new heritage records.
There have been over two decades of research and development of digital
visualisation technologies in archaeology and heritage. Approaches that utilise
photogrammetry, laser scanning and 3D modelling have become standard practice
in academic archaeology, commercial archaeological ventures and cultural
heritage management. However, there is as yet little community engagement with
digital visualisation technologies, despite community interest in the technologies
themselves. Expert forms of knowledge and professional priorities, rather than
community ones, invariably inform digital visualisations and the results, when seen
from the outside, can seem disconnected, clinical, and irrelevant. Low levels
of community use and re-use, let alone co-production, of these resources
highlight concerns relating to perceptions of authenticity and value. The ACCORD
project challenges this status quo and explores issues surrounding expertise,
ownership and value in digital heritage visualisation through co-design
AHRC

21. AHRCAndrew Prescott
and co-production. Importantly, forms of community-based social value
relating to the historic environment are integrated into the design and recording
process. Funded by the AHRC Digital Transformations programme as a Connected
Communities project, ACCORD is a 15-month partnership between the Digital
Design Studio at the Glasgow School of Art, Archaeology Scotland, the University
of Manchester and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical
Monuments of Scotland.
Project Team: PI Stuart Jeffrey, CI Sian Jones, RA Mhairi Maxwell,
CI Alex Hale, Phil Richardson and Cara Jones.
Our Data Ourselves
Do you know how much data you generate? Do you know where it goes? Is it being
sold by Google to increase their market share, now valued at £250 billion? Is it
being ‘scooped’ by the GCHQ or NSA? The Snowden revelations show that security
agencies are surreptitiously taking data from our phones, cameras, apps, and
anything else that leaves a digital trace. Especially if you use a mobile device, you
are actively contributing to the 2.5 billion gigabytes of data generated daily. To put
that in perspective, this would be enough data to fill one hundred million iPhones,
every day. Yet public understanding of our information-rich environment and our
quantified selves remains underdeveloped.
‘Our Data Ourselves’ is a research project at King’s College London examining the
data we generate on our mobile devices. We have brought together media and
cultural theorists, computer scientists, programmers and youth to explore this
‘big social data’ (BSD) we generate. As arts and humanities researchers we are
interested in the development and transfer of the technical skills and knowledge
necessary for the capture and analysis of the different forms of BSD, and its
transformation into community research data. Our project asks whether BSD
can be transformed into a public asset and become a creative resource for
cultural and economic community development.
Herein lies a fundamental challenge with big social data. Even though we generate
this data, it does not really belong to us. The moment we upload content, interact
with a website and/or use an app, data flows out of our devices into myriad complex
circuits where it is aggregated, that is, cut up, mixed, matched, and endlessly
recombined with other data. Once recombined to produce value, it is returned to
us in everything from targeted ads to security flags. As worrying, this all transpires
in a highly proprietary environment, leaving us in a data-centric society over which
we have little control and limited understanding.
A first step in critical inquiry comes in the moment of data generation. We are
developing apps and tools that will trace, extract and visualise the data that gets
generated by youth. We have paired with members of Young Rewired State,
a UK-based independent global network of young people under 18 who have taught
themselves to programme computers, code software and share their ideas with
like-minded peers at events around the world. Our co-researchers are working
with us to develop tools and applications to capture, visualise and understand key
components of that big social data, specifically what is generated when they text,
browse, post, and generate symbolic content on their smartphones.
We have already held one hackathon where our youth coder partners considered
the ways in which smartphones generate BSD. The questions that they focussed
on allowed groups to improve upon the MobileMiner app that we have developed
to track the data they are generating on their devices; to think about how privacy
agreements increase dataveillance; and finally to consider the access to personal
data that third parties are granted, particularly via seemingly benign smartphone
applications. We will hold another hackathon that will explore both tools for
analysing data captured on personal devices and the development of an ethical
framework for data sharing available for widespread community use. It is our
contention that in creating an open environment for BSD research and developing
an ethical framework for data sharing available for widespread community use,
we can contribute to a big social data commons. Indeed, if it is ‘our data ourselves’,
our BSD commons will empower us to use it in new ways, both in community and
by arts and humanities researchers.
Project Team: Tobias Blanke, Mark Coté, Jennifer Pybus and Giles Greenway.
Poetics of the Archive: Creative and Community
Engagement with the Bloodaxe Archive
The Bloodaxe archive, newly acquired by Newcastle University, is an internationally
significant resource for contemporary poetry and includes files of poems,
with editorial markings, letters and financial information relating to all the poets
Bloodaxe Books has published since its inception in 1978. The challenge of this
project, funded by the AHRC, is not only to make the resource available for scholarly
research through creating a standard web-based catalogue, but also to reframe
the archive by designing more creative, open-ended and playful interactions.
The project brings together a multidisciplinary team of poets, literary researchers,
visual artists, digital artists, data visualisation specialists, filmmakers, archivists
and library staff. In addition, the project introduces different community groups
of poets, poetry readers and young people to the physical archive with a view to
allowing their active engagements to animate and expand the meaning of the space
between user and archive, to feed into the design of new interfaces and to drive
the development of new theoretical and critical questions about the nature and
use of literary archives.

22. Andrew Prescott AHRC
The project will add material to the archive through filmed, in-depth interviews
by Colette Bryce and Ahren Warner with poets published by Bloodaxe Books.
Some of these have already been collected and edited into a film, ‘Conversation
for an Archive’ recently shown at Poetry International at the Southbank. New visual
materials, mash-ups, texts, films, hybrid forms and installations are in process of
development. Using digitisations of materials in the archive, cleared in terms of
copyright, the project will also produce a ‘generous’ exploratory interface that
will enable multiple forms of visualisation, aggregation and comparison of
archive content.
One idea being explored, for instance, is a novel kind of search and comparison
between the shape and line length of poems on the page. Technology, far from
offering a simple antithesis to the paper archive, can, we believe, liberate us to
think about both the mobile process of writing and editing and the materiality of
paper, in a kind of future retrospective. The ‘Marginalia Machine’ for instance,
designed by Tom Schofield, separates the marginal notes on the paper from the
background text as they are digitised and reproduces them in a public performance
of writing on a continuous paper scroll. This puts the fixity of archived papers back
into movement and provokes reflection on conventional thinking about what is lost
in digital reproductions of the archived page. Other digital visual materials approach
the intimacy of paper, “the simple, strokeable, in the handness of it” as Anne
Stevenson writes in a poem entitled simply ‘Paper’, and our fascination with
the word, particularly the hand-written word, inscribed or traced on it.
Project Team: PI Linda Anderson, RA Colette Bryce, RA Ahren Warner, RA Tom Schofield,
Rebecca Bradley, Kimberley Gaiger, CI David Kirk, CI Irene Brown, CI Alan Turnbull, CI Bill
Herbert, CI Jackie Kay CI Sean O’Brien and filmmaker Kate Sweeney.

23. REACT Objects Sandbox
We – REACT Objects Sandbox* – recently funded six collaborations between
academic researchers and creative businesses to explore the human
experiences in the ‘Internet of Things.’
It has become clear that the nature of the relationship between the Internet
and our material world is rapidly changing, especially as people’s acceptance
of ubiquitous digital technology grows. The ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT);
the convergence of the Internet and the material world, is going to become
increasingly pervasive, inconspicuous and sophisticated and has the capability
to profoundly change our environment.
If our environment is to be profoundly altered, then we need to engage people
who understand human behaviour, society and history – the state of living
– which is in part what we do in REACT. Their involvement isn’t just participation
in critical discourse, but to collaborate with creative studios to create well
considered physical products that can exist successfully in the world and provide
an alternative to innovation which solely focusses on productivity, efficiency and
surveillance. We fund and support collaborations between Arts and Humanities
scholars, arguably those who best understand the ‘state of living’, and creative
businesses. Each collaboration is supported by the producer within a framework
developed through Watershed called Sandbox. The Sandbox framework allows us
to explore alternatives to purely technology driven innovation and consider
a more nuanced, holistic approach.
Although Sandbox is a framework for exploration and R&D, it’s also a set of values
and ideals. People are central to Sandbox. People as users, viewers and audiences
but also everyone within the cohort (those involved in the six projects.) We curate
people as much as ideas. We believe diversity of experience, knowledge and skills
is beneficial, in fact the more diverse the cohort the better. The bringing together
of people with differing levels of skills in different areas raises a quality aspiration
threshold throughout Sandbox. It’s clear each project is better for this diversity
and it is one of the biggest advantages to funding multiple projects at once
rather than funding just one. The Sandbox producer plays a key role in brokering
relationships, finding appropriate contacts and maintaining the process as a
dynamic network. Sandbox is around three months of exploration. The
collaboration starts with an insight or a nascent idea which is then explored.
Throughout the 3 months there are a number of workshops where the cohort
comes together, each programmed by the producer. These are the opportunities
for the project teams to share, question and critique each other.
REACTTom Metcalfe

24. REACTTom Metcalfe
Through these workshops and meetings the producer and industry advisors
encourage collaborations to adopt and share knowledge and methodologies from
academic research; we borrow thinking and processes from design and business
and draw upon our experience from the cultural sector. The projects focus on the
possible experiences for the user or audience whilst seeking to understand the value,
however that may be defined, to everyone within the product’s eco-system.
It is explorative R&D and product development in quite a short period of time
and each project does it differently.
Measuring success, and equally, failure is tricky. But a minimum for success is
a well-considered concept; well-designed, where user-experiences are engaging
and demonstrate value propositions. To achieve this type of success in this intensive
short period of time I believe you need a framework underpinned by values and
ideals and a cohort, all implemented and programmed by a producer, that isn’t
employed by any collaborators’ institution.
Technology and innovation is rapidly changing our world, like never before.
But there shouldn’t be just one way to innovate, innovation must come in many
forms. Objects Sandbox is our contribution to the development and conversation
around the ‘Internet of Things.’ If we could have a legacy, I’d hope it was that we
also showed how important the bigger picture is to technology innovation and
why we need to consider the state of living.
Tom Metcalfe – Producer, REACT Objects Sandbox.
REACT
*REACT is a knowledge exchange hub funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council. It is a collaboration between the University of the West of England and
Watershed and the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter.
*REACT business development is funded by iNets SouthWest Creative Industries
through Creative England and ERDF.

25. Paul Coulton
Lancaster University is in partnership with Newcastle University and the Royal
College of Art within the AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub, The Creative Exchange.
Our aim is to bring together creative industry companies and Arts and Humanities
academics to explore the potential of something we are calling ‘digital public
space’, where anyone, anywhere, anytime, can access, explore and create with
digital content. This collaboration is in the form of innovative research projects
that explore various themes associated with digital public space. The theme I lead
is called ‘Making the Digital Physical’ and its primary aim is to transform the digital
space trapped inside screens and devices into physical experiences in the real
world, in particular moving beyond the primarily visual experiences of flat screens
towards ones that can engage all our senses so that the digital public space can
also be felt, heard, tasted, smelt, or even worn. Drawing inspiration from research
in areas such as: tangible and natural interfaces; perceptive and ambient media;
augmented reality/virtuality; hacking and 3D printing, the projects create innovative
prototypes that explore plausible futures in which we can turn digital spaces into
lived experiences. While all the projects in this theme share this experiential quality,
they do so in very different ways, thus reflecting the particular partners within
a project. Therefore to illustrate just some of the potential of this research area,
I will highlight some of the projects undertaken thus far in the following paragraphs.
Numbers that Matter
The Numbers that Matter project aim was to explore what would happen if people
could create smart devices that reported very specific data to the wearer – numbers
that mattered to them the most. What if they could invent a watch that told you that
your neighbours were lonely and needed some company? What if we could create a
badge that indicated the air quality in the spaces you use, or a glove that reacted to
the weather? How would it affect us? Would these products change our behaviour as
individuals? Or more interestingly, could they help us become more aware citizens?
PAC-LAN
The design of many so-called ‘location based games’ means the attention of the
player is directed to the mobile phone screen for navigation through the physical
space, thus limiting player immersion to the single dimension of the virtual game.
This research uses a mixed reality game to examine how physical immersion could
also by designed into the physical space in such a way that the combined digital/
physical space becomes self navigable. PAC-LAN is a real world recreation of the
arcade classic Pac-Man, in which the players physically take on the role of the game
avatars, either Pac-Man or one of the four ghosts, to collect real physical objects
in a real world location. The players use Android phones with on-board Near Field
Communication readers (essentially the same technology used for travel cards such
The Creative Exchange
as Oyster in London.) To interact, NFC game pills (created from Frisbees) attach
to the physical environment (e.g. lamp posts) and tags on opposing players to
enact the game.
Physical Playlist
The shared mix-tape had an emotional and physical connection that digital shared
content often lacks. Writeable CDs came too late or too close to the rise of the
mp3 to become a shareable treasured object. This project aims to explore the
relationship between the physicality of a shareable personalised object that has
digital content embedded within it. Whilst the mix-tape offered elements of
personalisation, the objects created for the Physical Playlist can take almost any
form, and, being digital, they can also be enabled so that they can only be played
on a specific day, at a specific time, or perhaps only when the weather is warm and
sunny, thus allowing the creator to produce a very unique, personalised experience.
Cold Sun
Cold Sun is a game that illustrates how scientific and real world data can be
integrated into game mechanics, in this case as live weather data, time, location,
and climate change forecasts, in order to enhance the rhetoric within the game
design by engaging the player at a more personal level. The result is a hybrid,
dual-mode adventure game where players must survive over a set period of time
in a strange, future landscape, affected by real-time weather, in order to traverse
the extreme climates of a dream world by night. In particular it seeks to ‘humanise’
the scientific data by presenting it as a personal experience, allowing players
to rehearse plausible futures based directly on and in relation to this real
world (weather and climate) data.
All these projects are addressing the merging of physical and digital to create what
we often describe as phygital experiences. The reason behind describing them as
phygital rather than the ‘Internet of Things’ is two-fold Firstly, ‘IoT’ emphasises the
infrastructure. I see it as part of the evolution of the web from a space we visit to
places we can live in. The distinction between place and space has a long tradition
in geography, which suggests that place is perceived as security and space is
freedom: we are attached to the first and long for the latter. We have enjoyed the
freedoms of the spaces of the web but as we increasingly incorporate our personal
data and objects, then it will need to provide us with a sense of place. The second
aspect is a way of emphasising that these are systems and products that have not
simply had some digital functionality embedded within them, but relate to a class
of connected devices whose functionality and operation exist simultaneously in
both virtual and physical places and will inevitably form part of what we are
calling the Digital Public Space.

26. Natasha Trotman
Remixing Weather Forecasts
Tangible Linguistics — Hearing with your Hands
Remixing weather forecasts forms part of the Tangible Linguistics series, created
whilst on the Information Experience Design course at the Royal College of Art.
Tangible Linguistics explores how information can be experienced in more
tactile/haptic ways and seeks to discover what is lost or gained when presented
with a spoken description of the weather, which is then translated into musical
notation, melody and vibrations through the playing of the notation. The aim
of presenting weather data in this way is to encourage the visitor to engage
with everyday information in a new way by using one of their other senses.
Tangible Linguistics examines whether experiencing linguistics/spoken information/
data in a ‘remixed’ format via other modes can transform a person’s experience
and understanding of the data and is the basis for turning a weather forecast into
a vibrational melodic object by extracting the data (sound/information) and turning
this into a tactile/haptic experience.
This project seeks to question, explore and unpack our intangible, tangible
relationship and experience of weather data, its new status as an object
and the various tactile ways weather data can be experienced.
The motivation and purpose driving my projects is the creation of something that
can be appreciated by all, irrespective of abilities or views. I look at ways to unpack,
explore and use data in a tactile way; this is based on my research and understanding
of the way data interfaces with our lives via multiple modes.
Essential sources of inspiration for me are the RCA IED department and the research
and work of Csikszentmihalyi, Gustav Freytag, Zsofia Ruttkay and Sean Donahue.
Much of my work exists in a number of formats, such as visual, physical and audio.
The purpose of these multiple platforms is to explore and create various ways
to encourage new experiences for the audience and users as well as initiate
new conversations using various factors and multi-modal textures.
Tangible Linguistics seeks to understand, facilitate and participate in new
ways of experiencing data and studies how people understand and relate to
this data. This goal is undertaken via the exploration of tactile translations
and representations of personal and public data via the illumination of
topics and data sets within my project.
Royal College of Art

27. Ruskin and The Maker Movement
The New Maker Movement bears close resemblance to the Arts and Crafts Movement
(1860-1910), which was a reaction against industrialised manufacturing. They share
the practice of decentralised making and the value of ‘hands-on’ craftsmanship.
The Arts and Crafts movement was influenced by the writings of John Ruskin, most
notably his essays ‘The 7 lamps of Architecture’ (1849) and ‘The Stones of Venice’
(1851-53); both served as manifestos that outlined the values of craftsmanship.
These lessons were guiding principles for how to make things well. The project
intends to examine the enduring relevance of these principles in the context
of the New Maker Movement.
The 7 Lamps of Making
The 7 Lamps of Making re-visits John Ruskin’s essay ‘The 7 Lamps of Architecture’
(1849) as a guide for 21st century making - translating 19th century craft theory
into a contemporary design project. Ruskin used the word ‘lamps’ to mean guides.
These ‘lamps’ are objectified as tangible examples of the seven guides in practice
- as critical objects that embody the enduring principles of good craftsmanship.
Adopting the vocabulary of the Maker Movement, the project renders the principles
relevant to makers now - using readily available democratic tools and materials such
as 3D printing, LED lighting, laser cutters and kit electronics. ‘The 7 Lamps of Making’
places the New Maker Movement in historical context, recognising and disseminating
the relevant craft values that have, and remain, necessary to make things of quality.
www.7lamps.info
FabricaDean Brown

28. Digital Design Weekend: We Are Open
openFrameworks Lab: We are Open
A DIY door sign made from coloured tape welcomes visitors to a studio buzzing
with people busily working on a series of projects ranging from human computer
interaction, low cost computing to computer vision and more. The event,
an open workshop with programmers from the openFrameworks community,
artists Hellicar&Lewis, hackers, designers, students, teachers, and the general
public, was part of the V&A’s first Digital Design Weekend in September 2010.
A few weeks earlier, an open call had been circulated to communities of
programmers to join the event at the V&A and work collaboratively with each other
and the public. The challenge was to develop a series of interactive coding projects
over the weekend with input from museum visitors. The response to the open call
was overwhelming. Over 50 people, including designers and technologists from
across Europe and the United States, joined in a weekend of co-creating, great
coffee and the opportunity to meet like minded people. Their discussions and
creative exchange went on to continue long after the event ended.
The pilot Digital Design Weekend followed the V&A’s exhibition Decode: Digital
Design Sensations opened at the V&A. Decode presented the latest developments
in digital and interactive design, from small screenbased graphics to large scale
interactive installations and works by established international artists and designers.
Decode offered the Digital Programmes team a new opportunity to bring in a diverse
community of artists and designers and involve them in our programmes; from
public workshops and activities for kids, to large scale events such as the
Digital Design Weekend.
Since the team was formed in 2008, the aim of our work has been to engage visitors
of all ages in a range of activities and events that promote innovative digital art,
design practices, collaborative processes, inspire creativity and stimulate discussion.
We wanted to engage audiences creatively and critically with technology used digital
art and design and provide opportunities for the public to meet practitioners,
whilst also enabling them to explore, learn and be creative with technology.
It was through Decode that we found the opportunity to start engaging digital artists
and designers, people like Karsten Schmidt, a computational designer and an early
contributor to the Processing.org project who merges code, design, art & craft
skills ; engineer, musician and hacker Memo Akten; Hellicar&Lewis, founded in 2008
by Pete Hellicar and Joel Gethin Lewis with the express aim of building a creative
business around open source and Tinker London, a multidisciplinary design studio
that ran from May 2007 to December 2010. Those and many more took part in our
activities to unselfishly share their knowledge and skills with the public. With these
programmes we wanted to demystify technology and media by revealing its design
V&AIrini Papadimitriou

29. Irini Papadimitriou V&A
processes and empowering visitors to be makers and not just consumers.
We wanted to not only bring the work of all these innovators to the attention
of the public, but also to enable visitors to be part of it.
That door sign from the early days, openFrameworks Lab: We are Open, sums
up in a few words what the Digital Design Weekend is all about and what it aims
to bring to the Museum.
The Digital Design Weekend was introduced in order to create open dialogue
between artists,designers and audiences. Coinciding with the London Design Festival
at the V&A, the event aims to explore and promote contemporary digital art and
design and present cutting edge work and research projects, giving audiences the
opportunity to meet the practitioners and find out more about processes, engaging
in dialogue, debate and the creation of culture.
The Digital Design Weekend’s purpose was to transform the Museum into one
big workshop. While we have always been interested in showcasing the latest
developments in digital and interactive design, offering opportunities for
the public to see ‘show and tell’ presentations of new projects and to meet
practitioners who explore intersections of craft, technology and science, the
main focus has not been in presenting finished pieces. On the contrary, the Digital
Design Weekend looks mainly at ideas, processes and work under development.
Studios and galleries become makerspaces, tinkerspaces or labs, where visitors
come together with artists and designers to discuss and think about objects,
making and working collaboratively.
While the Digital Design Weekend was growing bigger every year, it was soon realised
that all these partnerships and collaborations taking place around and during the
event needed a more regular forum to develop and grow. A big annual event like this
was a powerful way to bring so many people together, but how were we to sustain
all these discussions, partnerships, collaborations and creative exchange that had
started taking place?
Then a new programme, Digital Futures, began in May 2012 as a series of informal
meet-ups. Digital Futures started as an open studio showcase for sustaining
collaborations and links with universities, offering opportunities to students and
researchers from digital media, computational, interactive arts & digital design
courses to share, show and discuss their work with fellow researchers, professionals
and the public. Besides being a chance to bring academic work and research to the
public, it was also a flexible and open space for people to meet, network, present
and share innovative projects, as well as a platform for nurturing discussion
and future collaborations between those taking part.
Considering the unusual challenges of working within a museum space, it was
a great advantage to be able to have an open event where participants could turn
up with prototypes and pop up installations to share. The programme has come
to include workshops and round-table discussions, talks, feedback sessions
alongside showcases which give participants the chance to show their work
in a national museum.
Digital Futures has developed into regular monthly meet-ups that reach universities
across London and beyond. That is not to say it is only an event for students.
As a platform for sharing, exchange and networking, this programme is particularly
focused on collaborative practices and cross disciplinary work, and it aims to engage
in a dialogue with academic institutions and creative industries. We are interested
in exploring technology’s role in connecting art, science, design, crafts and more,
but also in creating a space for co-producing, sharing, distributing and supporting
emerging artists, designers & start-ups which build links with industry.
Maker culture, DIY media, physicality and technology, human-machine interaction
and environment are some of the first ideas we started exploring early on at the
Digital Design Weekend. In 2012, the Digital Design Weekend’s theme of gesture and
communication coincided with the Alan Turing Centenary and included work by a
number of artists, from early digital art pioneers held in the V&A’s computer arts
collection, to emerging contemporaries investigating his enduring influence on art
and contemporary culture. Then, last year’s event looked at collaborations between
Art, Design & Science; how art and design can give a new perspectives on scientific
endeavours and how scientific developments influence and inspire works of art
in new media.
One of the highlights of 2013 was a climate change and fashion hackathon led
jointly by the Met Office, Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of Dundee
and Falmouth University. This open, public hackathon brought together a group
of brilliant people who worked collaboratively over the weekend, working across
disciplines and developing projects, some of which are still ongoing and being
displayed internationally.
That hackathon was the result of some earlier partnerships and joint events with
the Met Office and University of Dundee at Digital Futures sessions. And coming
to 2014, Open Collaborative Making would not have happened without these earlier
collaborations. It is a great pleasure to welcome back partners like the Met Office
and University of Dundee, but also it is another exciting occasion for bringing on
board new people and organisations. This year we will be inviting participants and
audiences to explore digital value, cultural value and ‘making’ value.

30. Irini Papadimitriou
The programme includes projects such as Heidi Hinder’s Money No Object, which
explores a new significance for material and physical currencies in an increasingly
immaterial digital world, one where smart payment transactions are imperceptible,
but human emotions, creativity and culture retain a value that money can’t buy.
Or, Knyttan, sharing tools for pioneering the democratisation of manufacturing,
the Restart Project helping people understand the impact of electronic waste and
how to negate it and Flora Bowden and Dan Lockton’s Drawing Energy & Powerchord
that explores energy use and everyday life, investigating and communicating data
in meaningful ways.
We are again inviting people to join in a weekend of working, playing, collaborating,
networking and sharing knowledge, tools, practice to encourage experimentation
and for another year we want to engage people with the processes of design and
making through provocative and surprising means.
The possibilities opened by the maker movement, desktop fabrication tools
and new technologies allow for new alliances, remixes, resistance and the power
to reclaim culture. From this, the future of cottage industries and independent
fabrication are generating new economies led by inventors and entrepreneurs
operating on their own terms.
At the same time environmental, economic challenges and the increasing scarcity
of resources have become central to work by designers, artists and scientists,
who are looking to innovative materials and processes as well as sustainable
approaches to making and production. Can these concerns lead to easier and
stronger collaborations where skills and resources are shared? Maker and DIY
culture is not only contributing to innovation, but is also having a significant effect
on education, communities and industry. Museums and other cultural organisations
can have an active role opening up discussions about our future and the impact of
technologies, setting the ground for activities that bring people together, enabling
such collaborations and promoting peer production and skill-sharing. By opening
their doors to experimentation and collective making, encouraging communities
and people to create and participate, question and not passively consume,
museums can nurture the inventors and entrepreneurs of the future.
Irini Papadimitriou, Digital Programmes Manager.
V&A

31. openFrameworks Lab, Hellicar & Lewis, V&A Digital Design Week (2010)
An open workshop by Hellicar&Lewis and programmers from the
openFrameworks community developing interactive coding projects.
Photo by Irini Papadimitriou ©
Garden of Russolo, Yuri Suzuki, V&A Digital Design Weekend (2013)
Interactive installation of voice activated sound works ‘White Noise
Machines’, inspired by Futurist composer Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori.
Photo by Victoria and Albert Museum, London ©
Assa Ashuach Studio, V&A Digital Design Weekend (2011)
Assa Ashuach’s unique 3D interactive software allows people to modify or
co-design his products and manufacture them on demand.
Photo by Victoria and Albert Museum, London ©
Musical Table, Kouichi Okamoto, V&A Digital Design Weekend (2012)
A multitude of musical boxes wired up to a table that responds to the
movements of visitors. Photo by Victoria and Albert Museum, London ©

32. Contact:
Jon Rogers
Irini Papadimitiou
Andrew Prescott
j.rogers@dundee.ac.uk
i.papadimitriou@vam.ac.uk
andrew.prescott@kcl.ac.uk
Supported by:Funded by:
Image Credits
In order of appearance in the book;
Microsoft Research : Tenison Road
Street Party (x2.) Photograph by
David Sweeney ©
BBC R&D : Perceptive Radio.
Photograph by BBC Research
& Development 2014 ©
BBC R&D : Playlister Fob Prototypes.
Photograph by BBC Research
& Development 2014 ©
BBC R&D : The Physical Playlist
Machine. Photograph by BBC
Research & Development 2014 ©
Met Office : Space Apps 2013
Photograph by Adam Burt ©
Met Office : The Explorable Story Project
Photograph by Martha Sedgwick ©
Met Office : Genevieve and Her Dancers
Visualisation by Peter Cook ©
Uniform & Studio PSK : Kixl
Photograph by Uniform ©
Uniform & Studio PSK : Weather Systems
Photograph by Uniform ©
AHRC : Data-object (2013), bronze cast by
Koutaro Sano, visualising data on age and
dexterity. Photograph by Ian Gwilt ©
AHRC : Marginalia Machine. The Poetics of the
Archive: Creative and Community Engagement
with the Bloodaxe Archive. Photograph by
Tom Schofield ©
REACT: Objects Sandbox, InTouch.
Photograph by Kinneir Dufort ©
REACT: Objects Sandbox, Reflector.
Photograph by Uniform ©
Fabrica : The 7 Lamps of Making (x2)
Photographs by Shek Po Kwan / Fabrika ©
All images are copyright to their
respective owners.