This week, we’re slowly shuffling to the edges of our seats as we approach the announcement of this year’s Playable City Award winner, the Studio was home to a brilliant discussion about creativity and citizenship, we had a good crop of Studio affiliates speaking at San Francisco’s tech conference, Solid, and we gear up for the second Being There workshop.

After a month of debate and discussion surrounding our wonderful Playable City Award shortlist, we are drawing near to the announcement of a winner. Studio Producer Verity and Director Clare are heading to London on Monday, where a panel of industry judges at the forefront of art, culture, and technology will conduct final interviews and decide on the winning project. Find out who’s on the panel. Remind yourself of the projects and read and the comments before 9th June, as one of them will be installed in Bristol this Autumn. The Bristol Post have written a brilliant article about this year’s shortlist here.

This week, the DCRC hosted a discussion in the Studio with some of the authors of DIY Citizenship, a book from MIT Press, which tackles many of the same issues as the Creative Citizens project, exploring the ways in which creativity can add to civic and community life. The Creative Citizens Conference will be held at the Royal College of Art this September.

We’ve just found out that residents Phil Tew and Tom Mitchell have embarked on an ambitious new project, working as part of a team of coders, engineers, composers, dancers, and lighting and video designers. Dance-work, Transmission has been inspired by the network patterns travelled by infectious diseases and their similarity to networks of human interaction. Music and light will be triggered by the movements of dancers, via bespoke sensors designed especially for the show. The project will premiere at the Black Box Theatre in late June, as part of Yorkshire Festival 2014, and we hope it will make its way down to Bristol some time soon. The team will be giving a lunchtime talk here on 11 July about the project. More information will be posted to our events page soon.

Objects Sandbox Producer Tom returned from San Francisco this week, after he gave a talk at the Solid Conference about User Experience in the Internet of Things. He will be writing a blog about the Conference soon, so keep an eye on the Objects Website. Two other talks whose speakers have ties with the Studio were New Materials, New Narratives, by our former Creative Technologist Dan Williams, and A Lamp Post is a Thing Too, by Tom Armitage who worked on Hello Lamp Post, last year’s Playable City Award winner.

Next week, the Studio will be host to the second ever Being There workshop. Being There is a three year EPSRC funded project exploring robotics in public spaces. The project and its collaborators will investigate how cutting-edge robotics can enable people to participate in public spaces, as a place to meet and share ideas. They will be working with an advanced programmable humanoid robot called ‘NAO’ throughout the project. iShed’s role in the project is to work alongside the researchers, using our experience in public engagement to help bring the research out of the lab and into a range of public spaces in Bristol and Bath. The project’s collaborators are the Universities of Exeter, Bath, Oxford, Queen Mary and the Bristol Robotics Lab (UWE and UoB). We really can’t wait for the project to develop, and we’ll be keeping you up to date with the workshops as they happen.

To top off this week’s exciting news, our wonderful resident app developers, Calvium have just been shortlisted for a 2014 Bristol Post Business Award, under the ‘Best Creative/Technological Business’ category. The winners of each category will be announced on 25 June, so we’re crossing fingers, toes and mobile devices in the hope that they win.