Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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CHI 2018: Strategies for Engaging Communities in Creating Physical Civic Technologies
Our second CHI paper this year is also from the Ardler Inventors project, picking up a little further down the line during the second and third stages of the project. The ultimate aim of the project was to explore how we could use hackathon-like events, which we called Inventor Days, to catalyse a community of…
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CHI 2018: Everybody’s Hacking: Participation and the Mainstreaming of Hackathons
We’ve had two papers accepted into CHI 2018 based on the Ardler Inventors project, the first of which is based on fieldwork at six hackathons. I’ll write about this one first because chronologically it was the first piece of work done on the project, which informed the design of our Inventor Days at later stages. You…
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Community Inventor Days in Ardler
A couple of weeks ago I presented our paper Community Inventor Days: Scaffolding Grassroots Innovation with Maker Events at DIS 2017 in Edinburgh. It’s the first publication from our Ardler Inventors project, summing up the series of three hackathon-like events that we ran in Ardler last summer. The paper is open access and available from the…
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Notwestminster 2017: Remaking a Maker Day
When I started a survey of hackathons as part of the Ardler Inventors project last year, Notwestminster’s Maker Day was the first event I visited. Bringing together a mixed audience of councillors, local government employees, activists, coders and academics together to imagine different futures for local democracy was a perfect fit for our project. Afterwards,…
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10 Years of the Wray Photo Display
On August 10th 2006, we deployed the first version of the Wray Photo Display in a side room of the village hall, which was at the time mostly used as a waiting room when the doctor visited. The software was pretty stable, I thought, but I’d soon learn that was rarely the sticking point when…
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