In this Lunchtime Talk, Jess Hoffman and Paul Clarke from Uninvited Guests will introduce their AR projects - Billennium and Future Places Toolkit and discuss whether creative tech and sci-fi storytelling can inspire people to imagine better futures for their places.

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. Designed specifically for areas under construction or redevelopment, the audience is taken on a guided tour and asked to imagine the future of their city using a combination of performance, augmented reality, spatialised sound design and a cinematic soundtrack.

Through Paul's research on the Digital Placemaking Pathfinder of Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, Uninvited Guests began to explore 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 their progress and discuss some of the questions they are exploring such as: 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? And can theatre and emerging technologies facilitate entertaining, playful ways of doing speculative architecture and prototyping alternative, more inclusive futures together?

---