We kicked off 2024 by dreaming of how community technologies can support a thriving neighbourhood right here in Knowle West.
KWMC has a long history of working in and with communities to make, hack, develop and re-mix tech for community use. Over the years, KWMC has grown to be many things – a community hub, a digital manufacturing space, and a neighbourhood “living lab”. At the heart of all our work is supporting people to make positive changes in their lives and community by working with the arts, technology, and care to co-design new ways of doing things and explore new futures.
We’ve been enjoying being part of the growing community of practice around ‘Community Tech’ facilitated by Promising Trouble, as part of the Makers and Maintainers cohort. Through this work we’ve been deep diving into our practices of facilitating community tech action and storytelling.
Open working
In the spirit of open working, and rather than just sharing our public-facing work, we want to show you a behind-the-scenes look into some of the collective future-ing we’ve been doing this year. Below is a sneak-peek into a couple of our workshops!
To kick off our community tech development for 2024, KWMC staff met with BDFI Researcher in Residence Rebecca Coleman and digital artist David Matunda who has begun a ten-month Community Tech Infrastructure Fellowship at KWMC as part of the MyWorld Ideas programme.
We met in a hybrid format, meaning some of us were in-person while others joined online. We always apply learnings from our Come Together (2021) project to these hybrid setups, and we believe it’s important to create hybrid offerings for improving accessibility and inclusion.
We began with a playful warm-up task imagining, ‘if community tech were an animal, what would it be?’ This raised lots of interesting insight around the qualities and feelings of community tech, rather than focusing on strict definitions. Here were our responses:
- Bevers, because they work together as a team to build things that impact the environment around them. They are also a little strange-looking and unglamorous!
- Ants, because they are hard-working and work together, they make changes to the environment, and they’re sometimes visible and sometimes not.
- Flock of birds, because they work as a unit, flying across the community, and their flight patterns are algorithmic.
- Platypus, because it is a mix of things, specific and bespoke.
- Robot dog, because it is a companion, a member of the community. You can teach it tricks, it can carry things between people, and it connects people.
- Octopus-unicorn, because it is imaginative and more conceptual, all about ideas.
We particularly loved these realisations of community tech impacting its environment, being a bespoke mixture of things, and sometimes being invisible. One definition of community tech that Promising Trouble are using is: “any hardware or software that delivers benefit to a community group, and which that community group has the authority to influence and control.” You can read more about community tech here. It is exciting to feel part of a national movement working to co-define what community tech can mean.
Next, we spent some time independently imagining the future of Knowle West as a community tech place. We visualised this future happening now, considering what it would look and feel like and what people would be doing. Our manifestations can be summarised as:
- Space for experimenting and making all over the neighbourhood – our makerspace, The Factory, would be filled everyday with community-members collaborating and making together. We liked the thought of our makerspace as a potters wheel: bringing in problems and challenges, then creating solutions together, embracing failures and adapting as we go. Community tech activity was happening far beyond the KWMC buildings; distributed and inseparable from the community.
- Tools and knowledge being open-source and suitable for different access needs – we would continue championing mixing skills and knowledges across all ages and types of people. Based on ‘the commons’, we would continue to work towards a more equitable model to accessing community tech – where people can do what they want with this tech and have support where needed. We imagined people having access to training and resourced for the maintenance of software and hardware.
- Continue growing a culture of care and a ‘can do’ attitude – local people would feel empowered to solve small/large issues, driven by the needs of the community. People would work together around issues that interest them.
We talked about how not all problems can or should be solved with tech. At KWMC, we often talk about adopting a tech-pull ethos, meaning we facilitate co-creation processes where community pull in technology when it feels appropriate and beneficial, rather than pushing predetermined tech solutions onto situations which may not need/want them. Read more about our approach on the Bristol Approach website.
For example, in our recent 2023 project ‘Connect to Collect’, we pulled in tech such as audio recorders, DIY nature cameras, bat boxes and WhatsApp groups, to further support our local neighbourhood scientists to capture biodiversity in Knowle West. These were all accessible, optional elements to enhance their research. We also spent time mapping needs and wants before jumping to just using things like nature watch cameras or sensors for the sake of it.
In our next workshop a couple of weeks later, we looked at the future visions we had co-created above and consolidated them into four future statements:
- Space: In the future, KWMC buildings are open and accessible to all. Community tech places will exist across Knowle West as spaces for community experimenting and testing.
- Culture: In the future, there is a community-led ‘community tech’ culture, where people have the know-how, craft, skills and inspiration to make and maintain solutions using tech.
- Shared knowledge: In the future, there are open access tools and accessible knowledge places (digital and physical) in and beyond Knowle West.
- Infrastructure: In the future, there is functioning accessible community digital infrastructure which could include platforms, servers, open-data and sensors.
We then tried out an exercise called ‘backcasting‘, where you imagine that you are currently in the future, then work backwards to see how you might get there. We did some rapid idea generation, which involved writing down everything we could think of doing as practical actions from the far future to now. Through this, we came up with some inspiring actions! We now want to work with artists to visualise and create tangible glimpses of this future, helping us move towards Knowle West as a thriving community tech place.
We will be continuing this work into 2024, including: an audit of all our tech and how to use it, sharing more community tech stories, piloting activities for hands-on creative playing, plus trying out/remixing KWMC’s assets and tools.
We are excited to share more soon! If you’d like to share your thoughts on community tech in Knowle West, we’d love to hear from you – please email: ella.chedburn@kwmc.org.uk or call 0117 903 0444.
