Co-Designing With Communities

Public spaces embody our shared humanity, and aim to be free to access, culturally diverse and open to all.

People and communities are the heart of these spaces.

Through Digital Democracies Community Engagement programme, we have collaborated with people from communities that we engage and inhabit, to bring forward authentic voices from underrepresented groups.

Agency and authenticity are key drivers for co-designing with communities. We want to create meaningful engagement and encourage collaboration to create something new and relevant to the people and place.

If you would like us to work with you on co-design with your communities in your, get in touch on digitaldemocracies@threshold.tv.

Community Engagement Programme

Birchwood Connections: Frequency Festival (Oct 2021)

Local residents from Birchwood in Lincoln collaborated with Lumo Workshop to make a digital artwork and wearable tech accessories to light up themselves and their city as part of Frequency Festival 2021.

Lumo Workshop invited local people to ‘tell us about your place’, sharing their stories of life in Birchwood to be part of a digital artwork premiered at the festival. They also invited residents to get creative at drop-in workshops, to make a light-up badge or help to create a large sculpture to be installed in the city centre during Frequency Festival.

The digital artwork can be viewed via the video link below. During the festival the video could be found using the QR codes found on sculptures in Birchwood and Cornhill.

Birchwood Connections was a chance to get creative and forge connections with other communities in the city. During the festival the digital artwork could be found using the QR codes found on sculptures in Birchwood and Cornhill. You can also see the stories and ideas of local residents on the digital artwork here.

Produced by Threshold Studios and supported by Digital Democracies.

The Algorithmic Tales: Brighton Digital Festival (Nov 2021)

As part of Digital Democracies community engagement projects, artist David Blandy worked with the Brighton community to create fragments of stories from his project The Algorithmic Tales via two workshops.

Through drawing, writing, active play, and a Game Jam, participants developed a setting that reflected a vision of Brighton and Mars in the distant future, incorporating sites, personal stories, and myths of the area.

Taking inspiration from the local wildlife, the group generated self-portraits projected into a far-distant future, where humans have adapted and merged with the area’s flora and fauna. These new characters developed new myths, with maps, legendary figures, and illustrations. The project forms future archeology of the site, these imagined protagonists unearthing our present.

“Algorithmic Tales was more than I expected. The online experience was welcoming, well run, educational, inspiring, and fun! ”

– Workshop participant

Produced by Lighthouse and supported through Digital Democracies.