Ardler Inventors

Summary

The Ardler Inventors project brought together university researchers, community members from Dundee’s Ardler neighbourhood and creatives from Dundee’s vibrant creative scene to think about how new types of technology could be put to good use in the community.

We worked with Ardler because Ardler Village Trust, a charity who support the community, were keen to be involved in the project as part of their digital inclusion activities. This supported our aims to engage more with people outside the city centre.

The core activity of the project was a series of three 'Inventor Days', which took place over summer 2016. We based the events on hackathons, which have been successful in bringing different groups of people together around intensive bursts of creativity, but adapted the format significantly to engage a non-technical audience. For example, where most hackathons are 24-48 hour events, ours ran across three Saturday afternoons, so that parents and families could attend.

Over three weekends, we guided attendees through the type of design process we normally use: looking at their local area and identifying opportunities for change; playful exploration with technology; and finally prototyping digital products that they could test in their community.

Getting started

Our past research has always been focused on exploring new roles for technology in communities. We’ve done this by working with individual communities over long periods of time to build relationships, involve them meaningfully in the design process, and test interventions in the community.

But we began to notice a problem as these projects came to an end: as funding ran out and researchers moved on to other projects and universities, the things we built couldn’t be sustained. This is problem because they had clear value to the communities, and often the community had invested a lot of their own time and effort into the projects. Because of this, our current research looks at infrastructuring, which means creating the circumstances under which people can engage in design and innovation activities themselves.

We approached community organisations around Dundee and Ardler Village Trust were particularly receptive to the idea, seeing it as a novel way of achieving their digital inclusion goals.

Partnerships

The project was a collaboration between the following partners: Ardler Village Trust, Dundee Makerspace and the University of Dundee.

Aims

The overall aim was to create knowledge, enthusiasm and relationships within the community that would allow them to continue working with technology in their local area beyond the lifespan of the project. Ultimately, we want to democratise the use of technology so that it is not just researchers and developers who can shape it.

Audiences

People from the Ardler community (not necessarily community active), Creative Makers in Tayside

Evaluation

Participants and Researchers interviews were recorded at the end of the project. Most attendees were interviewed separately about their experiences, particularly how it lived up to their expectations and their expectations for the next event, as well as the aspects of the day that they found rewarding or frustrating. The researchers and several of the makers also held a debriefing session immediately after each event to reflect on their own experiences, particularly successful and unsuccessful aspects of the events’ design.

The project was presented at the international Designing Interactive Systems conference in Edinburgh 2017. The project also lead to two academic papers.

• Community Inventor Days: Scaffolding Grassroots Innovation with Maker Events
• Strategies for Engaging Communities in Creating Physical Civic Technologies

Key learning

1. A major outcome for the project was demonstrating to the participants from Ardler that creating their own technology was within their grasp. For those with limited experience, creating with electronics and code is a daunting task, but a fun, low-pressure environment helped ease people into this and provided inspiration for them to keep exploring on their own.
2. Placing Ardler’s knowledge and experiences first was essential for engaging with the community. Before we did anything involving technology, we placed participants from Ardler in the role of being experts by encouraging them to take researchers and makers on tours of the local area and share stories from the neighbourhood.
3. One of the strengths of our approach is its potential to be picked up and used by a variety of organisations, especially local councils and charities. By contrast to our past approaches, which were lengthy and resource-intensive, this project showed how a community of interest can be bootstrapped quickly through simple interventions. This places it within the realm of possibility for resource-starved organisations who operate across many neighbourhoods.
4. Our motivation for bringing together community members and makers was initially about connecting together the needs and knowledge of the community with the skills of the makers. Although we had not framed this as overtly educational, we found that in addition to harnessing the existing skills and knowledge, there was also considerable transfer of knowledge into the community. Not only did the community members gain much more hands-on experience and new knowledge than we had anticipated, but the makers also seemed to value working in this role.
5. A remaining challenge is how to motivate those who might fulfil the role of mentors and bring making skills into communities. There may well be a place for universities and researchers in taking on this role, but local enthusiasts are likely more plentiful in many areas. Although the makers who attended all reported finding it rewarding, recruitment was much harder than we had anticipated, particularly given the city’s vibrant and close-knit creative scene.