Category: Project Updates

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Ardler Inventor Day #1: Getting To Know You

    When you’re doing research with communities, the first event is always the most nerve-wracking. You’ve made all the contacts, been to the community festival, dished out a small forest’s worth of flyers and posters, bought plenty of biscuits. But will anyone actually turn up? Repurposing Hackathons for Everyone The Ardler Inventor Days are being run…

  • Launching: Hacking for Situated Civic Engagement

    In November, we kicked off Hacking for Situated Civic Engagement, a project funded by EPSRC to explore how hackathons can be used to design civic technologies with communities. Over the course of the project, we’ll be running a series of hackathons with the Ardler community in Dundee to identify and attempt to address some local issues with…

  • Four Makerspaces and a Shed

    Over the past three months, I’ve been doing site visits to maker and hacker spaces across Scotland. For the first phase of In the Making, we’re surveying existing facilities in the UK to identify what opportunities and challenges they might present to disabled users. Two Types of Space It quickly became clear that makerspaces fell…