Creative Ecologies Category
Widening the Voices in Creative Technology Design
by Liz Roberts , Juliet Lennox and Simon Moreton
Bristol + Bath Creative R+D has been working for the last three years with creative and cultural sectors and communities across Bristol and Bath who work closely with their local communities to inform the creative processes.
Until now the team itself had not worked directly with local communities in response to local challenges. The Generous Food Futures workshop on Saturday 15th of October was a chance to test some of our thinking around alternative/diverse economies, care and hopeful futures developing through the Creative Ecologies Pathfinder and in Liz’s Alternatives at Scale research.
The Generous Food Futures workshop was the result of a collaborative partnership between B+B R+D team members (based at UWE), Bricks, and Studio Meineck. Bricks is a social enterprise with the mission to support local & creative communities to thrive in Bristol. It runs St Anne’s House, a community space, hosting artists, makers, organisations, well-being, social groups, meet-ups, workshops, talks, exhibitions, and events. Led by Chloe, Studio Meineck is a social design studio with an ethos that design should be co-designed, considerate and transform people’s lives, using sustained, responsive and thoughtful engagement.
The B+B R+D team hoped to widen out our current collaborators to include community members in a particular geographical community - the area of St Anne’s and Brislington, where Bricks is located – and bring new people into St Anne’s House. The workshop was something of a pilot to test how engagement with a co-design process leading to eventual creative technology prototyping would work. We were really pleased to see 25 people attend, reflecting a mix of people from the immediate local area with diverse interests in local sustainable food.
The workshop was premised on the ‘generous cities’ concept, stemming from regenerative design. It recognises the interdependencies within natural environments that mutually support them to thrive. As Kate Raworth points out, cities nestle within ecosystems like forests: Forests harvest solar energy, sequester carbon, store rainwater, fertilise soil, purify the air and more. We asked: How can cities do the same, giving back more to their ‘ecosystem’ than they take from it? Food is an engaging topic to start conversations around how food production and consumption have implications for carbon footprints, circular economy, food equity, climate resilient crops, inclusive jobs and so on.
The workshop centred around three local food projects who spoke about their projects and shared current design challenges they are facing: Annabel from Bountiful Bristol spoke about creating a network for collecting allotment surplus and to pass onto local food providers; Antony spoke about his new business, Flushrooms, growing mushrooms out of disused toilet space at St Anne’s House; and Katy spoke about her recent research growing and developing her artistic practice around working with Hydroponics.
The generous cities idea recognises that exceeding ecological limits unbalances social foundations too; thriving environments support thriving social systems and vice versa. We saw this in Saturday’s workshop with key themes of food insecurity and redistribution, opportunities to better connect food and other systems locally, and closed-loop processes, resonating across conversations.
We discussed how food maps existed in Bristol but that we probably needed to “map the maps” before thinking about how we could create a resource that would help local communities and food organisations connect with each other effectively. We also talked about how local growing spaces such as allotments, community gardens and even individually owned gardens had different remits and senses of ‘ownership’ and that knowledge around these varied greatly. We learnt that even technology and processes designed to be sustainable and make food growing more efficient could often have negative side effects including potentially toxic materials and built-in redundancy, producing waste, which could make closing the loop more challenging.
We’re really grateful that such a passionate group of people joined us on Saturday and were so generous with their time and ideas. We really look forward to continuing the conversations!
