The Oscars may be the latest from award season for the rich and famous, but we’ve been celebrating our own wins in the Studio, with residents getting nominated for, and winning regional awards. Whilst she was on the other side of the world, our Creative Director Clare Reddington picked up a ‘Long-term contribution to innovation in the South West’ recognition from the recent TechSpark Sparkie Awards. Also returning triumphant was resident Sammy Payne and the company she co-founded, Open Bionics - winning awards for ‘Most innovative use of hardware’, ‘Founder/ entrepreneur of the year’ and ‘Best startup’. Sammy later reaped another gong from the EDGE awards, this time for ‘Young Innovator of the Year’.

Other reasons to celebrate include REACT-supported Fabulous Beasts, the real world/digital stacking game, absolutely smashing their Kickstarter campaign, reaching, and surpassing the funding target way within the allocated time schedule. It’s now available to pre-order from their website, so you still have time to snap up the first edition of the product. 

Whilst one campaign ends, another begins. James Wheale of Understory has launched an Indigogo campaign to fund the ‘Chocolamentary’ that he’s been cooking up over the past year. The Chocolamentary will serve to explain the story of the world’s rarest chocolate bean. James is offering his multi-sensory, foody treats as rewards in the hope of raising enough to send a team of scientists and filmmakers to secret farms in Peru where this exclusive cacao is grown. Click on the link to the campaign or see more in the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD2qNzegp9I

Artist and producer Rik Lander has been play-testing a new work, ‘Job Vacancy: ECHOBORG’, which plays with the ideas of automation in the workplace, and the redundancy of humankind in a future steeped in artificial intelligence. We look forward to the next step in the development. 

With Chomko & Rosier's Shadowing having a successful run at Tokyo's Media Ambition Festival, and Clare Reddington, Producer Hilary O’Shaughnessy and Creative Technologist David Haylock currently in Nigeria for Playable City Lagos, the internationalisation of the project has been keeping us busy and well travelled! You can read Clare and Verity's brilliant blog posts on Tokyo here and here respectively, and Hilary's illuminating Guardian article on 'playability' in Lagos here.

We put this post to rest by announcing the winners of the Future Cemetery Design Competition: Designing Disposal for Both Dead Bodies and Digital Data. Sylvan Constellation by Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation DeathLAB and LATENT Productions envisages a network of memorial vessels transforming biomass into an elegant and perpetually renewing constellation of light, illuminating woodland pathways. The Sylvan Constellation team, based in New York, won a £5,000 cash prize and a month-long Summer 2016 residency during which they will research the historic 42-acre Arnos Vale Cemetery and work with the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society as well as with us in the Studio. We are excited to welcome the team and see how their designs develop during the residency.