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CONNECTION
building relationships; supporting community
Surprising Connections
Six ‘prototype projects’ developing new cultural products and experiences brought together co-researchers, creative practitioners and technologists. We discovered that by starting with such a diverse co-design group extraordinary things started to happen. One great example is the project ‘Recycle City’, and this is an extract from a film about the project. Conceived by co-researcher Ruth Harrison, it began as an artistic project to imagine a future city, bringing a community together around a set of values and involving gathering and reusing discarded items. It ended up creating a huge network of community groups, young people, tech specialists, gardeners, librarians – everyone and anyone – having fun and making models of their ideas for a socially-connected, beautiful, environmentally-friendly city, and then recreating them using augmented reality in the Bristol of now. The new and surprising connections of ‘Recycle City’ gathered a momentum that encouraged ideas from the bottom-up, a breaking down of labels and hierarchies and the organic development of new connections. Barney Heywood and Lucy Telling, of cultural tech company Stand + Stare, worked as partners on ‘Recycle City’. Below the film are comments from a reflective interview with them both on how they saw relationships on the project.
To see the entire Recycle City prototype film, as well as other films about our prototypes, please click here.
