This week, we announced the call out for applications for the 3rd annual Playable City Award, looked Though Another’s Eyes and waved our hankies in residents’ general direction as they journeyed East for exhibitions and labs in Shanghai and Tokyo.

Applications are now open for the 2015 Playable City Award, calling for original ideas that put play at the heart of our future cities. The winning project will be awarded £30K, help to create and install the work in Bristol this autumn, and support with future touring opportunities. Apply here to turn your visions of a Playable City into a reality. To find out more about the Award, and the past two commissioned projects, read Clare Reddington’s brilliant Huffington Post article, ‘Keep Lamp Posts Weird’. (Although don’t derive from this that Playable City submissions have to be lamp-post related, they absolutely do not!)

A recent addition to the Playable City Award prize is a trip to Tokyo in October 2015 to share learning from the Award as part of Watershed and Bristol City Council’s Playable City Tokyo programme. Creative Director of Watershed, Clare Reddington is in Tokyo this very moment, shaping the programme. We will have more news to share about this exciting Bristol-Tokyo connection next week. 

Along with conversations about Playable City, Clare and resident Chloe Meineck have been exploring the future of childhood play in Tokyo as part of the British Council’s ELEVATE programme. The programme brings together 12 creative practitioners from the UK and East Asia to present and share their ideas, which re-imagine different kinds of play for 0-8 year olds. Clare has written about the ELEVATE cohort and reflections from the trip on the REACT Play Sandbox website. 

Rosie Poebright and Phill Tew have been user testing their new mobile powered experience. Through Another’s Eyes enables a person to walk around in someone else’s life for an hour, creating an understanding on an emotional and experiential level of the hopes, fears and motivations of others. They have taken their original prototype, which they developed in Brazil last year as part of the Recife Playable City Exchange, and remounted it in Bristol, rerecording the audio in English and rerouting the narrative to specific locations in the city. They will be running the experience in Edinburgh in August, and plan to run it in Bristol in the next few months. Follow @splashandripple for updates.

Studio resident Victoria Forrest has created a beautiful interface for navigating Leonie Hampton’s body of photographic work, In the Shadow of Things. Victoria is travelling to the GREAT Festival of Creativity in Shanghai to showcase the piece. The interface will be projected on a huge 360 degree screen, and the audience will be able to self-curate the content around them, using the AlphaSphere as a controller. Seth Jackson, Tom Metcalfe, Laura Kriefman and Rosie Poebright are also showcasing their work at the festival. We will share more about the festival next week, once the residents have reported back.

Emma Agusita hosted a CreBiz lab in the Studio this week, inviting students and professors from different EU Universities to get together and explore ways to establish a Business Development Laboratory Study Module for undergraduate and graduate students who have potential to be (self) employed after their graduation in the field of creative industries. The project is EU funded and is being delivered under the under the Erasmus framework by UWE, the University of Turku in Finland, the University of Lisbon in Portugal and the University of Navarra, Spain.