Program of the day:

We are happy to head out to a demo of Bristol’s repurposed Planetarium, the Data Dome. Run by We the Curious, an exhibition space for art and science, it bears similarity to the Exploratorium in San Fancisco. Some French architects have also been working on taking technology to public spaces by building a movable dome. We then set out to southern Bristol.

Visit of the Knowle West Media Centre.

We are kindly shown around and meet with Mena Fombo, the Programme Manager for Young People.

Top stories:

  • “Digital/smart cities or open data don’t attract people as such. You’ve got to frame programmes with issues that people feel connected to”.

  • With a group of young people, Mena developed Change Creators, a programme “to make a positive change in the world using the power of arts, media and technology.”.

Spanning 11 weeks, the programme encourages the participants to “identify the issues they care about, then use new technologies in creative ways to develop a social change campaign. As well as developing transferable skills (such as project management, team building and public speaking), the Change Creators will connect with leaders locally, nationally and internationally, and have real experiences of leading.”

We find out about the projects they developed during these 11 weeks around food wastage and mental health.

Next stop, the KWMC Factory

The Centre’s innovation space for making, digital fabrication and product design.

Fiona Dowling and Tom Barnes walk us through their model, their activities and their role in the Bristol Approach’s Citizen Sensing / damp busters project.

The challenge in creating stable, robust data, how to make it live and digestible, and even more importantly, how to translate them into actions.

We decide to stick around for lunch.

Filwood Community Centre Cafe, here we come.

A hearty jacket potato reward and the best cuppa in town.

We align on a narrative of the project’s re-framing and stages of a restitution to Bristol City Council, the next day.

We travel back, Alaine and Romain head out to lead a few guerilla interviews.

We conclude the day with the team retrospective