Introducing the prototypes
Following a 6-month process, involving 53 co-designers (including the Connecting Through Culture co-researchers, in collaboration with creative technologists, artists, designers and our charity and community partners), we are excited to announce the funding of 6 prototype project ideas. The teams, made up of different groups of individuals in the cohort, in partnership with external partners and critical friends, will be developing these ideas over the coming months and we will be reporting on their progress through the Connecting Through Culture blog and social channels.
Prototype projects
Table Top Travel
Team: Jeanne Ellin, George Densley, Natalie Ward, Clare Finnimore
Critical Friends: Abas Kulmiye, Erica Harrison
Partners: Alive Activities, 91 Ways
Table Top Travels is a multisensory at-home dining experience that promotes the feeling of being transported to another place and ‘presence’ at that location. Imagined as a way for housebound, chronically ill or disabled people to experience different cultures as a welcomed guest rather than a visiting tourist. Using a combination of real-world items, art, literature and audio and visual simulation the experience aims to offer an interactive taste of travel from the comfort of home, a way of people who are facing barriers to travel to connect or reconnect with places of interest and importance to them.
Emotive Fabrics
Team: Fanny Eaton-Hall, Carmen Groves, Malcolm Hamilton, Annie Lywood, Becca Rose, Dani Hale, Ruby Bennett
Critical Friends: TBC
Partners: KWMC
Utilising off-the-shelf technology to augment textiles, we will design a means for people to make a wearable patch/badge/pocket that conveys their culture, sense of self and emotions via light, sounds, vibrations and/or movement to other people, both in person or remotely.
Retirement Reloaded
Team: Elanora Ferry, Liz Clarke, Georgina Densley, Barney Heywood, Lucy Heywood
Critical Friends: Jeanne Ellin, Malcolm Hamilton, Karen Harvey
Partners: Alive Activities, Stand + Stare
An interactive book project working creatively with older women around the themes of transition and change, invisibility and permission. Using writing, autobiography and inspiration from unruly female archetypes, the work will focus on finding voice as an older woman, engaging with technology in a felt way, to offer a playful, experiential and empowering experience. The result of this will become an interactive book showcasing the womens’ stories.
Recycle City
Team: Ruth Harrisson, Rebecka Fleetwood-Smith, Erica Harrison, Lucie Martin-Jones Jones, Barney Heywood, Lucy Heywood, Cora Fern, Stefan Boakye, Lizzie Hawthorn
Critical Friends: Jeanne Ellin, Malcolm Hamilton, Karen Harvey
Partners: Stand + Stare, Zubr, WECIL, Trinity Centre, Uni of Bristol Micro-Campus, Alive gardening
RECYCLE CITY was founded by Ruth Harrisson and is about designing and visioning a future – it is a speculative city founded on the values of creativity, community, opportunity, human and animal welfare, healing, connection, conservation, love, joy and celebration. It is a place where all ages / species can be together. Ruth has been inviting individuals from her community and beyond to share their hopes for RECYCLE CITY. This project is founded on her work and networks within her community. We will bring people together, to create visions for RECYCLE CITY. Guest artists / specialist makers will be invited to co-facilitate workshops around e.g., recycling and re-use, allowing us to create visions in the forms of artworks / objects / stories. Our workshops will combine the analogue with the digital. Working with Stand + Stare and Zubr, we will use AI generated imagery and AR filters to create visions for RECYCLE CITY.
Dictionary of Missing/Celebrated Words
Team: Chloe Meineck, Raquel Meseguer Zafe, Graham Jonson, Shrouk El-Attar, Ian Quaife
Critical Friends: Jeanne Ellin, Frank Burnett & Gaie Burnett
Partners: Bristol Older People’s Forum
This queer and disabled led team will run workshops with groups of queer and disabled intergenerational groups, to explore if there are experiences that we are missing language for. We will evolve language to better express our experiences, both challenging and centering, difficult and poetic. We will then design ways to playfully disrupt the norm, and sharing this new language in public spaces in digital and low-fi ways. We will be learning what it is practice queer crip principles, and how to co-create art that explores this new language with the intergenerational participants that attend the workshops. *Crip is a term reappropriated in disability justice and disability scholarship. It denotes a desire to jolt people out of ideas of normalcy and deviance, ability and disability.
Anyone Remember the Wash House?
Team: Ros Martin, Gill Greenwood, Ruth Myers, Shawn Sobers, Gill Simmons, Mike Stuart, Lisa May Thomas
Critical Friends: Lisa Wan, Amy Lo
Partners: Breathing Fire Black Women Playback Theatre Company
‘Anyone Remember the Wash House’, led by Ros Martin, seeks to reclaim and reflect on stories from working class past lives, of lives in industry, and use of the wash house out of necessity. Wash house stories will be captured through a series of collaboratively designed workshops drawing from elders memories of Wash house/ Bath house rituals. The intention is to prototype pop up ‘zines’, to include soundscapes, which will be available physically and digitally.