A session of a SoundWave after-school session, 2024, Image Credit: Ibi Feher
KWMC is seeking an experienced and passionate music/sound practitioner, who has an interest in creative technologies and digital music, to lead SoundWave, an innovative sound/music programme, delivered for young people aged 10-17, who live or study locally to Knowle West and south Bristol communities.
Candidates should have 5+ years experience of facilitating creative activities for young people, with 3+ years of project co-ordination experience. They will be an excellent facilitator and have leadership skills to support a team of freelance associate practitioners (up to 3 associates per session).
The role will involve lots of in person delivery with children and young people. Regular evening work will be required as part of this role.
Access
We want to ensure our recruitment process is accessible for you. If you would like this information in a different format, require further information, need support with access requirements or an informal chat about the post please contact us by email at enquiries@kwmc.org.uk or call 0117 903 0444.
As part of our commitment to being a Disability Confident Employer, we guarantee an interview to anyone who identifies as disabled (as defined by the Equalities Act 2010) that meets the essential criteria set out in the person specification.
Job Details
Job Title: SoundWave Programme Lead
Contract: 12 months fixed term, with potential to extend subject to funding.
Salary: £29,176 pro rata. Actual 3 day per week salary £17,506.
Hours: 22.5 hours per week, excluding 30 minute lunch/rest break.
Working days: Preferably Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. But this is negotiable.
Holiday entitlement: 25 days per year plus bank holidays pro rata. Actual 3 day per week entitlement is 15 days per year plus bank holidays pro rata.
Probationary period: 3 months
Place of work: Knowle West Media Centre, Leinster Avenue, Bristol, BS4 1NL. Occasional working at KWMC The Factory, Unit 24/25, Filwood Green Business Park, Hengrove Way, Bristol BS4 1ET.
How to apply
You will find more information about KWMC, the role and the person specification in the job packs below. You should read this information before you complete the online application form.
You will be asked some basic details, answer 3 questions about your skills and experience and to upload a CV. You will also be asked to complete our anonymous equalities monitoring form.
Closing date
Midnight, Monday 6 January 2025
Contact
Please get in touch with any questions about the application process by emailing gail.bevan@kwmc.org.uk or calling 0117 903 0444. If you have any questions about the role, you can email questions to Head of Young People’s Programme ellen@kwmc.org.uk
This Artist Residency for Filwood Broadway will see artist(s) embedding in, and making work with, the community of Knowle West, South Bristol across a year of regeneration. This work will centre around Filwood Broadway as the high street transforms with Levelling Up Funded (LUF) works taking place, disrupting and regenerating the high street.
Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC) are leading on commissioning public art across Filwood Broadway as part of the LUF works.
We are looking for creative/s that work in socially engaged or participatory ways and want to explore, experiment, play and make artwork in and with the local community. We invite you to bring your fresh perspective, skills and knowledge to learn from and work with the local community.
We are looking for artists who have:
Practices that engage with areas such as urban intervention, social action, transforming public space.
Experience of working in and with communities. It is essential that you have a socially engaged practice.
5+ years experience working in socially engaged arts.
Experience of, or interest in, digital technologies and community tech.
A collaborative approach to making.
We will consider proposals from artists / creatives working in any medium where the above applies. For example, you might be an artist working in performance, sound, creative technologies, or other creative. Whatever your practice please note that whilst temporary interventions are actively encouraged, we are looking for the artist to produce lasting outcomes through the residency. We are open to ideas for this from book/digital artworks to proposals for outcomes in the public realm. The ambition is that this residency could inform further semi-permanent or permanent outcomes.
Key Themes From many conversations with residents and other stakeholders, we’ve identified key themes that should be considered through the work:
Knowle West heritage and culture.
Community voice and leadership – particularly young people.
Biodiversity, climate change
Health and wellbeing.
Safety and belonging.
Use local materials and suppliers, and reuse what there already is.
Learned skills through participation.
Artist Fees
The fee for this 12 month residency is £30,000 on a freelance basis.
We understand that you might need to bring in additional artist expertise throughout the year and have separate budget to support this. There is also additional materials / production budget.
Although artists are welcome to apply from any location, we have an expectation that the appointed artist will truly embed themselves in the community. There is no budget for accommodation and there is a small travel budget. We do have additional access budget to support this residency. KWMC can support the creation of flexible work plans.
There is a short application form linked below. If you have any access needs that require you to submit your proposal in another format, please get in touch so we can help you find a suitable option.
The closing date is midnight on 29th November 2024.
Interviews will take place on Thursday 12th December with options of online or in person.
Check out these powerful self-portraits and audio stories by local multicultural women, reflecting on their own sense of self within the context of Knowle West and the homes they have left behind…
The following works were created through a series of workshops facilitated by our Spring 2024 artist in residence, Myah Asha Jeffers: a portrait and documentary photographer, writer and filmmaker.
Myah connected with local multicultural women using photography, printmaking, sound, and textiles to explore the complexity of the diasporic experience (the experience of leaving your original homeland). These art pieces offer blueprints of possible futures; exploring and reimagining notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ through the lens of migration.
Through workshops, local multicultural women learned how to make their own self-portrait using a medium format film camera; offering them a sense of agency and self-determination through how they wished to present themselves through the lens.
This work serves as a celebration of an ever-evolving community comprised of multiple cultures, faiths and races.
Rendering each portrait blue using a cyanotype printing method, originally used for architectural blueprints, these self-portraits act as a blueprint for the future of Knowle West.
Tapestry
Drawing inspiration from the various forms of traditional cloth in African, Arab and Caribbean cultures, this tapestry is a re-imagining of a community cloth, within the context of Knowle West. Some of the women featured also worked on constructing the tapestry – weaving their past and future into each fabric square.
The laborious and tactile process of cutting, pressing and sewing the tapestry, using pieces of material from a vast range of countries, created a space for quiet reflections on personal histories, as well as a communal sharing of traditions.
Sound Piece
Each of the women shared their reflections on the realities of migration, what it means to make a new home miles away from your own, and hopes for the future.
Myah began her residency with a pop-up photo booth on Filwood Broadway in Knowle West which was open to everyone in the community. Lots of local people (and dogs!) of all ages came to say hi and take a self-portrait using Myah’s old medium format camera. This workshop was part of the Diverse Artists Network DIASPORA! Festival programme, celebrating cultural diversity through the arts.
This led on to Myah working with One Love Hub, a group of local multicultural women who work together to connect, share skills and stories, and access local cultural food. During these workshops, they captured self-portraits which they exposed as cyanotypes, co-created the tapestry above, and gathered audio recordings of their experiences.
Reflection and Next Steps
While reflecting on her residency, Myah commented that she had lots of freedom alongside hands-on support. The residency opened up new ways of working for her, especially around sound and connecting with a local sound artist. Myah particularly appreciated the support from technicians at our makerspace KWMC The Factory and freedom from budget constraints, allowing for more meaningful, valuable work that embedded care and adaptability into each session.
We are excited to share that since Myah’s residency, One Love Hub are going to be running a textile project with us! The project is inspired by the moment when Myah asked the group if they remembered the first photograph that was taken of them. One woman remembered that her first photograph was taken on her wedding day and she would love to remake her wedding dress then be photographed again, feeling more empowered this time around.
This project was a particularly timely celebration of diversity in Knowle West, given the appalling racist and islamophobic riots that took place in Bristol and across the UK in August 2024. Knowle West Media Centre stand against all forms of discrimination and racism. We believe the diversity of communities should be celebrated. Bristol is officially signed up as a City of Sanctuary, and we proudly stand by this. Refugees are warmly welcomed here.
Written by Julia Costa Carneiro (Research Lead at KWMC)
Co-producing sustainability transformations with local communities, reflections on the role of research in co-creative processes for change.
Sometimes you need to leave your home to find your place again. I hope that this had happened with me last week, but it’s too early to judge on that. We’ve been participating at the Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference (NESS2024) in Turku from 4 to 6.6.2024, themed “Co-producing knowledge for sustainability”. And I come back with a fresh view on how I can support the co-creative experiments I am working on in my role as Research Lead at KWMC.
The conference gave us the possibility to discuss our GREENGAGE approach on Citizen Observatories with peers during the half-day workshop on “Potentials and challenges of citizen science in sustainability transformations.” Different to conventional academic conferences, these workshops opened a space for mutual learning and in-depth feedback as the participants had read the papers beforehand and there was enough time to discuss each contribution in a critical space, yet one with shared interests.
In our paper “Towards a Methodological Framework for Citizen Observatories to Promote Inclusive Urban Governance” we reflected on how we organise the GREENGAGE Innovation Action to prepare, test and learn collectively on the different observatories that we are developing in five pilots across Europe.
During the first year of the project, we were co-designing these observatories together with local planning agents, tech-providers, researchers and civic innovators and were forced to bring them all under one conceptual framework. This was very much against our belief that transformation needs to be grounded in specific social-political contexts and KWMC’s practice that established over the years a neighbourhood-based Living Lab. So, we envisioned GREENGAGE Observatories as situated, data-driven, community-led intelligence for implementing the European Green Deal that relate to each other within a pan-European policy and governance innovation ecosystem. This is too abstract to engage anyone beyond the academic community and even they can be puzzled. Although the high-level conceptualisation of experiments was needed due to the project brief, its time now for us social scientists to start interpreting and analysing what is happening in the messy real worlds of the different pilots and to gather colleagues to make sense of GREENGAGE Observatories to enable full-scale piloting after this summer.
Beside these workshops, the keynotes and panel discussions at the conference shine light on the topic of co-creation/co-production from various disciplinary angles and empiric cases. The speakers surfaced critical aspects that need to be considered but are often often not addressed, although they are especially meaningful in justice work. Issues that seem most relevant are power, followed by trust, ethics, process, transparency, accountability and many more, as the mentimeter pic shows. What can be the role of researchers in these? I got ensured that as critical, visionary and engaged action researcher, I am equipped to support these messy processes to become more reflexive and politically engaged. Through critical thinking and analysis, I can pinpoint what is not just, what is not sustainable and what are locked potentials for transformations.
I can also co-create “free spaces” where we think about the future, and facilitate arenas for in-depth conversation, to common some futures, as we are currently doing in KWMC’s visioning sessions. And I can describe where co-creative practices are shaping examples of preferred futures and thus make them visible and contribute to realise them.
Being a critical and engaged researcher in co-creative processes is a balancing act, that sometimes is so uncomfortable that it’s hard to trust in what you are doing. For that it is important to come together in someone’s distinctive community of practice, hearing from others that they face similar struggles and get to your own place again, getting secure in between insecurities.
We are looking for someone to work with our creative team to support the engagement, delivery and administration of creative programmes at KWMC. You will mostly be working with our Young People’s programme, co-developing and delivering activities for young people, with a focus on new and emerging creative technology.
The ideal candidate would be an excellent communicator and facilitator, experienced in working in community contexts with both young people and adults. We want this person to ensure that creative community engagement is at the heart of the programme’s development.
The ideal candidate will have experience in either digital design or making and can use these skills to develop creative activities that are exciting, accessible and can communicate big ideas.
You will work at both Knowle West Media Centre and KWMC’s Factory – a digital fabrication maker space and will work together with the team to ensure a vibrant and innovative space that is safe, accessible, collaborative and inclusive.
You will also be delivering activities at schools and out in the community.
Job Details
Salary: £25,933 per annum (for 30 hours a week this equates to £21,027).
Hours: Part time: 4 days a week* (core days are Monday – Thursday, including 1-2 evenings a week that will be essential to the role). We are open to people applying for a 3 day a week post, please indicate this in your application.
Contract: Temporary contract 9 months.
Location: Knowle West Media Centre and KWMC’s Factory in South Bristol.
We are a place-based organisation so presence in Knowle West is important, however we support flexible working hours and some remote working. We are open to proposals of how you would make the job work to fit your access needs.
We are looking for a fantastic leader to join the KWMC team and help us evolve as an organisation. We have been founder-led since 1996 and now, with CEO Carolyn Hassan’s retirement, we are entering a new chapter; one that will both celebrate KWMC’s legacy of community led change-making and embrace new possibilities.
Over the last 28 years, with Carolyn’s inspirational leadership, KWMC has grown from a local photography project into the internationally recognised organisation that it is today. KWMC has consistently developed pioneering arts and community-tech practices for social change, championed people-led innovation and supported the next generation to develop skills to become the change-makers of the future. From making DIY snail-cams to map our natural world, to creating music from air quality data, to mixing up AI and tattoo culture, KWMC has always been at the cutting edge of arts & tech led coproduction with communities.
We are now moving to a model of co-leadership, aligned with KWMC’s ethos of co-creation and collaboration.
Alistair Darling visits to mark the opening of the new KWMC strawbale building in 2008
I am really excited to see the next phase of KWMC, that will build on past learning and experience (and yes, including learning from mistakes). I have been privileged to be part of, and work with the brilliant community of Knowle West and am delighted that there is such energy, commitment, and courage to forge new ways of doing things that I know will make a real difference and contribute to positive futures for all.
Carolyn Hassan
We are thrilled that Martha King, previously KWMC Head of Arts, has been appointed as the new KWMC Creative Co-Director. Martha has worked at KWMC for over 8 years leading creative programmes, developing innovative arts and tech co-creation projects with communities, and representing the organisation internationally.
Martha King (centre) during a Collect to Connect event at Springfield Allotments. Image: Ibolya Fehrer.
I am honoured to be taking on this new role and look forward to helping steer KWMC into its next chapter. With our brilliant team and rich ecology of collaborators I look forward to further developing our ambitious arts & community-tech programmes, honing our storytelling and continuing to support communities and artists to imagine and make the changes they want to see. I look forward to supporting leaderful cultures to flourish within our organisation and beyond.
Martha King
We are advertising for a new Co-Director, of Business Development and Operations, to work alongside Martha, the trustees and team to lead KWMC through a process of refocusing and on into the future.
Carolyn Hassan giving a speech at the KWMC AGM 2023.
We are looking for a dynamic co-leader, who works with generosity and care to make amazing things happen. We want to welcome someone who has successfully developed innovative financial, business, and operational models for mission and value-led organisations. This new position will play a key role in enabling KWMC to deliver its mission of making fair and thriving neighbourhoods with arts, tech, and care.
Find out more information about the job and how to apply here.
As part of the Levelling Up Funded ‘Transforming Filwood Broadway’ regeneration project, Bristol City Council is seeking a multi-disciplinary team to work with the local community to deliver a High Street Delivery Plan and Improvements for Filwood Broadway High Street, in South Bristol. As Public Art partners on the project, KWMC are excited to share this call and look forward to working with an inspiring team who will bring additional expertise in high street renewal, economic development and capital works delivery.
This work will build on many years of engagement and work with local residents and stakeholders, and it is intended that study will build on this legacy to better connect the regeneration work with local economic development, food strategies, safety improvements, culture, community and public art, and develop clear deliverable improvement plans.
Stage One of the open-call process asks for project team details, motivation and three examples of previous projects. The second stage will shortlist three teams to provide detailed quotations. Alongside representatives from Bristol City Council, the judging panel will also include a representative from key local stakeholders Knowle West Media Centre and Knowle West Alliance.
The search for a design team also coincides with the appointment of Hayhurst and Co. for the £10m expansion and refurbishment of the local Filwood Community Centre.
Bids to deliver the contract will be evaluated 100 per cent on quality at Stage One. At Stage Two, bids will be judged 50 percent on quality, 20 per cent social value and 30 per cent on cost. It is expected that teams will be appointed via an NEC4 Professional Services Contract and consultants must hold employer’s liability insurance of £5 million, public liability insurance of £10 million and professional indemnity insurance of £1 million.
Competition Details
Project Title: Filwood Broadway High Street Delivery Plan and Improvements
Client: Bristol City Council
Project Value: £290,000
Commission Value: approximately £95,000
First Round Deadline: 22/03/2024
Shortlisting: 25/03/2024-29/03/2024
Request for Quotation Period: 01/04/2024-12/04/2024
We recently attended a conference about ‘Reimagining High Streets’, hosted by Historic England for those working in the arts, heritage, and local authorities to explore how community-led culture and heritage activities can support place-shaping and regeneration.
The day pulled together best practice and learnings from the High Street Heritage Action Zones (HSHAZ) Cultural Programme. This was the largest ever public-funded programme; providing four years of nationwide cultural activity helping high streets become more attractive, engaging and vibrant places for people to live, work and spend time. At the conference, individual HSHAZ projects shared their stories and how this activity can impact local regeneration.
With our local area of Knowle West on the brink of change (with £14.5m Levelling Up Funding awarded to the area), this felt like a good moment for us here at KWMC to speak with other organisations who have embedded cultural activity into their local high streets to see if there are any wisdoms and inspirational ideas that we can bring back to Knowle West.
How did HSHAZ work?
Simon Boase, the Cultural Programme Manager for Historic England, talked us through how the HSHAZ scheme worked. Historic England provided pilot grants of up to £10,000 for initial activity testing before awarding further funding of up to £120,000 for developed proposals. Alongside these grants, Historic England also commissioned projects taking place across multiple zones. Those taking up the offer ranged from volunteer led groups to established organisations.
Full project evaluation will be coming out in autumn 2024, but the overarching headlines are that out of the attendees of the 17,000 cultural and heritage events as part of HSHAZ:
82% felt greater sense of pride in their high street and the local area
85% rated the quality of event as very good
77% felt more a part of community than before
76% visited the high street mainly for the specific cultural event
Activities have also been helpful in training local people where jobs in the cultural sector are difficult to attain if you don’t already have lots of experience. Ben Treadway, a freelance producer from the town of Lowestoft, explained how multiple members of the team all went on to paid employment through the opportunities that HSHAZ provided.
Inspirational Projects and Resources
One common response to the scheme from those who took part was that, as a funder, Historic England were incredibly flexible, focusing on ‘outcomes’ not ‘output’. The ‘outcome’ is what is looking to be achieved at the end of a project. So, in this case, they were changing perceptions of heritage and the high street, supporting sustainable economic and cultural growth, and restoring and enhancing local historic character. The outputs are how they got there i.e. through the cultural programme.
Hearing from Daniel Bernstein, CEO of Emergency Exit Arts, this meant artists and organisations were genuinely able to co-create work and could be flexible, changing the activity as needed since the outcome was more important than the output.
Through their activity as a commissioned organisation working across 11 zones, Emergency Exit Arts produced Hi! Street Fests where a host puppet was created for each location, becoming a mascot for their place. Each host puppet represented the history and heritage of where they were from:
Volunteers were trained in each place to support a carnival arts procession and communities would get ready for their host puppet by decorating their streets. The legacy of this activity means that carnival groups are still working together in those locations, the host puppets are still representing that place at events, there is a greater appetite for putting on events in those spaces, and community producers are now embedded into Emergency Exit Arts projects. Check out the video below to see one of the mascots in action!
Hannah Harris, Chief Exec of Plymouth Culture spoke about using HSHAZ as an opportunity to test out ways of working. They ran 17 Meanwhile Use projects (using empty shops as spaces for artists / people to come together). Hannah explained how they realised that local community ownership produces the best economic benefit. The Meanwhile Use projects set out to prove that community ownership will produce long term transformation of the high street. Through this process, they undertook research of every space in the city centre and now know who owns and leases each space. This means there is a live conversation about use of spaces – they are not waiting for consultation on capital or city centre projects, but are part of a conversation from the outset.
Plymouth Culture also worked with Barbican Theatre to deliver a seven-month project ‘Meet Me at the Sundial’ which celebrated local people’s words and relationship with the city centre. Six commissioned practitioners completed a residency on some of the major city bus routes and in high street cafes – listening and chatting to people going about their day travelling into the city centre. These conversations inspired a night-time immersive event that began on a bus and finished at the city centre’s Sundial in March 2023:
Photography credit: Dom Moore for Barbican Theatre [source]
Vicky Holbrough, Co-founder and Director at Navigator North (Middlesbrough), shared details of The Exchange – a public participatory art installation created by Layla Khoo that invites people to exchange a day of their time volunteering for a local charity in return for an artwork (a porcelain block sculpture) to take home:
Photography credit: Jason Hynes for Celebrating Hidden Middlesbrough [source]
If you’re interested in creating your own free, community public events in high streets or town centres, check out the amazing Emergency Exit Arts Toolkit: Putting on a Hi! Street Event. It’s packed full of practical resources including examples/templates of risk assessments, event management plans, contracts, budgets etc.
We are feeling so inspired and excited to integrate these learnings into our work here in Knowle West. Thank you for sharing, HSHAZ!
“If you bring the spectacular to the street, people will come out” – Sukhy Johal, Director at Centre of Culture and Creativity at University of Lincoln.
Knowle West Media Centre are looking to commission an artist from the BIPOC global majority to join a community of change makers, spend time in and with Knowle West and bring your unique practice to co-create artwork in response to Future High Streets.
This residency will focus on activating local High Streets, opening possibilities for imagined, alternative futures.
Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC) are a place-based arts and community tech organisation who have been working in Knowle West, Bristol, for 26+ years with artists and the local community. KWMC has two sites in Knowle West, including a maker space (KWMC: The Factory) with a variety of digital fabrication kit and a studio hub with postproduction, music recording and other creative tech facilities. Our mission is to ‘Make a more thriving neighbourhood together, with arts, tech and care’, we do this by working as part of a strong neighbourhood ecology, bringing our practices of co-design to the Knowle West Alliance (a consortium of local organisations). We believe in the transformative potential that arts practices bring to imagining and co-creating preferable futures.
Knowle West is a 100-year-old council-built estate and close-knit neighbourhood, of about 12,000 residents, the area is rich in heritage and culture, but in the top 5% of England’s most deprived areas. In 2023, Filwood Broadway was awarded investment of £14.5 million from the Levelling Up Fund which will be used to transform Filwood Broadway High Street including amending the road layout to create more space for people, revamping Filwood Community Centre, expanding play opportunities for young people, and building new homes. This project runs parallel to the LUF project.
Residency: This residency is an invitation to make artwork in and with the community of Knowle West that creates tangible glimpses of possible futures, in response to Future High Streets.
The residency will also tie into DIASPORA! Festival, a city-wide festival in May, run by Diverse Artists Network, with a public facing event (could be a drop in workshop) on Monday 6th May 2024.
Within the residency, you might want to explore questions such as:
What could a thriving High Street look and feel like in the future?
How might arts-led approaches activate the public realm?
How can we bring arts and creativity into the day to day?
What can we do to rehearse the futures we want to live in?
How can arts practices help make community dreams more tangible?
How could creative tech be used for good in this context?
What is the relationship between wellbeing and environment in the context of our public realm?
Who is this for?
We are looking for artists / creatives from the global majority who work in socially engaged or participatory ways and want to explore, experiment and make artwork in and with the local community of Knowle West.
We invite you to bring your fresh perspective, skills and knowledge to learn from and work with the local community.
We are looking for artists who have:
Practices that engage with areas such as urban intervention, social action, transforming public space.
Experience of working in and with communities.
Experience of, or interest in, digital technologies and community tech.
A collaborative approach to making.
We are particularly excited to work with artists who have an experimental attitude towards community tech or a desire to expand their practice to include technologies (this could include anything from digital fabrication to physical computing).
We will consider proposals from artists / creatives working in any medium where the above applies. For example, you might be a digital, performance, visual, sound, socially engaged or graphic artist, social architect, creative technologist, maker or other creative.
We have an access-budget to support this residency and producers trained in supporting the creation of flexible work plans to meet your needs.
Timeline:
20th March: Application deadline.
28th March: All applicants informed of invite to interview.
2nd / 3rd / 4th April. Interviews and artist appointed.
W/C 15th April. Residency begins.
April. Exploring the neighbourhood. Familiarising yourself with the area. Developing ideas around how you’d like to work in the community – could be with a focused group / drop-in activities / other.
Monday 6th May: Public facing event (content tbc with appointed artist) as part of DIASPORA! Festival.
May, June, early July: Play, test and make with the community.
July: Sharing. Outcomes and learning from the residency will be shared with the local community and other key stakeholders in July 2024 at this year’s Knowle West Fest (date tbc).
Fees and Support
Artist fee: £3,500 inclusive of VAT.
Additional materials and fabrication budget available, to be agreed by KWMC producers.
Additional budget available to fund access needs.
KWMC can offer producer and engagement support, desk space, large format printing, access to digital tech (including 360 cameras, audio recording kit, film cameras, recording studio and more) digital fabrication at the KWMC: Factory maker space (digital fabrication kit includes: 3D printer, laser cutter, CNC machine, digital embroidery and more) and community tech infrastructure (including an R&D network, LoRaWAN, cloud platforms, sensor technologies) as part of the commission.
We support flexible working practices and KWMC producers will support you throughout to work in a way that works best for you.
If you have any access needs that require you to submit in another format, please get in touch so we can help you find a suitable option. All applications will be assessed according to the same criteria and submitting in a different format will not affect your chances of being selected.
If you would like any further information or have any questions, please contact jasmine.loveys@kwmc.org.uk or call 0117 903 0444 / 07561 036175.
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.
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 recent workshops!
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.
Photos of Collect to Connect walks. Photos by Ibi Feher.
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 and ask for Ella.
