Reflecting on the way the FutureEverything festival transforms the city of Manchester England into a living lab or play space for participatory experiments on art, society and technology.
View FutureEverything labs here. View slide show on FutureEverything – The City as Living Lab or Play Space here.
FutureEverything is an art, technology and social innovation organisation that runs year round innovation labs and an annual festival of art, music and ideas.
For 15 years, FutureEverything has showcased developments in digital culture, and has at times helped to lead and shape them, as with our early work on mobile and locative media in 2003-4.
Unusually for a festival, FutureEverything seeks to go beyond showcasing cool things, by acting as a space for research experiments on art, technology and society. It has developed a method in which the festival acts as a living laboratory, with the aim to generate new knowledge and ways of doing things.
Each year FutureEverything looks at one or more themes, which are developed during year-round innovation labs, lasting between 9 – 36 months. Recent projects have been on open data, remote collaboration, new mobilities and environmental mass observation.
The labs feed in and out of the annual FutureEverything festival, which transforms the city of Manchester England into a living lab or play space for participatory experiments, and its conference, which is a space where new concepts and ways of doing things come to light.
Over 15 years FutureEverything has developed very strong collaborative links with city partners in Manchester as well as a broad range of communities, companies and institutions. This makes it possible for us to play and experiment with the DNA of the networked city.
This approach has come out of a collaboration with ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster University, and the festival now forms a part of the research environment at Lancaster University, which is rated 6th among UK universities (1).
The festival attracts a world wide community of people who come to Manchester to take part. 50,000 people experience the festival, some people come to seek inspiration, others just to have a good time. A core of people come each year to take part in these participatory experiments.
In 2011, Festivals as Living Labs will be a theme of the FutureEverything 2011 festival and of the ECAS European festivals network, with events at FutureEverything in Manchester as well as CTM in Berlin and Cimatics in Brussels giving an opportunity to discuss and play with this unique approach to staging festival events. See futureeverything.org/news for info on calls for submissions later in the year.
New Mobilities is a lab running now. This week as part of my residency at Eyebeam in New York, I will run a blog where the focus is divergence, to widen the frame and look for as many approaches to this theme as possible. A workshop in Philadelphia on 16 July will then narrow the focus by looking at methods for developing art-design interventions on New Mobilities within the festival.
View FutureEverything labs here.
Inventing the Future – Festivals as Living Labs
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” (2).
This quote from 1971 by the American computer scientist Alan Kay, cited within the FutureEverything art exhibition in 2010, captures a common ethos in today’s digital culture.
The FutureEverything festival seeks to ‘bring the future into the present’, bringing together a world wide community of artists, technologists and future-thinkers to share, innovate and invent the future.
FutureEverything presents participatory art-design interventions which construct possible futures and enable people to inhabit them experientially and experimentally. These experiments devise and test innovations in art, society and technology, and collaboratively generate ideas and concepts. Participatory art projects in the festival envision and experience change in society or technology, bringing the future into the present.
The living lab approach has emerged out of disciplines including computer science and design. It involves taking research out of the laboratory to test ideas and prototypes with participants in real-life situations. It goes beyond simply testing with users by involving users in co-creation, experimentation and evaluation.
The FutureEverything living labs involve an unusual take on art curation, in which the curator adopts the role of a disruptor, staging participatory experiments in modern urban living that lead to people seeing a problem differently and can contribute to change. It also has characteristics of design and designing thinking, in particular participatory design.
FutureEverything combines these influences to transform the city of Manchester into a living lab or play space for participatory experiments.
The festival creates a space in which people can experiment and play. Activity can include artworks, technology prototypes, social innovations and design projects. This is most interesting when it is truly collaborative and people are outside their conventional roles – artists making social spaces, communities creating technology, technologists enabling us to perceive the world anew.
In its art programme and conference, FutureEverything brings together artists, curators, technologists, researchers, critics, futurologists and scientists to discover the small sparks that unfold into new ways of seeing the world. It features art exhibitions, workshops, performances and interventions, including many world firsts – transforming the city into a space of experimentation, making it come alive.
By adopting this approach, FutureEverything can devise and test thought-provoking new approaches to challenges in art, society and technology, and contribute to international debates in art, social innovation and digital culture.
Environment 2.0 – Climate Bubbles
View Environment 2.0 lab here and Environment 2.0 mass participation projects here.
One past example of this kind of art-design intervention is the Environment 2.0 project, which explored how the innovative forms of observation, mapping and participation found in locative media combined with the ability to share information globally and instantly creates an unprecedented capacity for mass participation, and participatory mass observation.
This consisted in a series of exploratory projects staged by Lancaster University and FutureEverything in collaboration with the Met Office and Natural History Museum testing innovative methodologies for participatory engagement in and observation of urban environment, biodiversity, and climate, and seeking to bring a fresh approach to the field of ‘citizen science.’
One of the Environment 2.0 projects was Climate Bubbles, devised by Carlo Buontempo, Alfie Dennen and Drew Hemment.
Climate Bubbles allowed us to experimentally and playfully devise and test a novel approach to data gathering by citizens. We wanted to invent a future in which citizens are data gatherers, creating quantifiable data in a non-standard, bottom-up, performative way. We set out to signpost a new relationship between citizens and environmental data, bringing the future into the present.
This was a playful, participatory mass observation project on local climate. Bubble blowing games were devised to enabled people across the city of Manchester to test air flow circulation, and by sharing the results online, enable the Met Office to create a snapshot of the Urban Heat Island phenomenon. The aim was to give the Met Office access to a wealth of urban climate data that is difficult to observe via conventional methods.
Urban climate is difficult to observe via conventional methods because it depends on small scale processes and the interaction between the city and the surrounding areas. The Met Office teamed up with Futuresonic and Lancaster University to solve this challenge, and working with artists, together they devised playful, experimental techniques to engage people in simultaneously taking many measurements of air flow across Manchester.
Two ‘bubble games’ were devised to test 1) the direction and 2) speed of wind flow.
1) The Bubble Chase: Stand at a place you can identify on an online map, and blow a bubble. Chase after the bubble, running to the place it pops, lands or hits an obstacle. Blow another bubble, repeating the procedure 5 – 10 times. Note the location of where you finish, so you can later identify it online.
2) The Bubble Race: Blow a bubble to see the general direction of the wind. Mark your starting position, and draw a line in chalk 10 metres away in the direction the wind is blowing. Blow a bubble from the starting position and start stopwatch. Note the time at which the bubble crosses the line.
Participants then inputted their individual bubble data into an online interactive map of the city, which showed the wind direction and speed measurements using data collected from participants over 24 hours, and were asked to identify which clothing they were wearing, to provide another indicator of weather conditions.
Bubble kits were produced and distributed during the presentation of the project, and downloadable instructions (‘instructables’) were put in the website to guide people through the bubble games and the process of creating their own bubble kits.
The project engaged hundreds of people in making measurements of local climate, and was successful both in its design and media impact. The Met Office intend to continue the project at a UK-wide scale.
All of the Environment 2.0 participatory observation experiments were evaluated in an Open Lab on the last day of the festival.
Like the other Environment 2.0 projects, Climate Bubbles was a playful art-design project with some serious outcomes, which has led to new collaborative projects and the development of a number of design principles for mass participation and citizen science projects.
(1) Guardian University Guide 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/table/2010/jun/04/university-league-table
(2) Quote attributed to Alan Kay at a meeting at PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, 1971.
Tags: art, FutureEverything, ImaginationLancaster, Innovation, Lancaster University, living lab, research, society, technology