This Lunchtime Talk will be broadcast live on Watershed's YouTube channel

In 2018, Uninvited Guests and Duncan Speakman developed the Augmented Reality (AR) performance Billennium, for Watershed and the Smart Internet Lab’s Layered Realities 5G Platform in Millennium Square. This is a guided tour of the future of a place, in which we tell site-specific science fiction stories, animated drawings of future architecture appear overlaid on today’s buildings, and you hear what different worlds might sound like through the mobile devices you carry. Partly through Paul’s research on the Digital Placemaking Pathfinder of Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, we became interested in whether approaches from Billennium could be applied in neighbourhood visioning and planning consultation. This has led to collaborating with creative technologists FENYCE on Future Places Toolkit, a set of live and digital facilitation tools that aim to inspire people to imagine better futures for their cities.

Jess and Paul will share where they’re at with developing Future Places Toolkit and some of the questions they are exploring: Can we use interactive performance and AR to get a wider range of people involved in discussing plans for their neighbourhoods, and would these conversations be more effective in the sites that are being developed? Can coming up with science fiction scenarios get people thinking critically about the places they live in and enable them to do some social dreaming together? Can theatre and emerging technologies facilitate entertaining, playful ways of doing speculative architecture and prototyping alternative, more inclusive futures together?

 

Join us on Fri 10th July, 13:00-14:00 for the talk and to take part in the discussion afterwards.

Watch live on YouTube

Billennium, STRP Festival at Dutch Design Week 2019, photo Boudewijn Bollmann, with live illustrations by Sam Steer.