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So we have two projects.
We’re under the umbrella of Community Hacking.
Community Hacking is a playful term
but it deals with the community in Wester Hailes,
which is west of Edinburgh.
The community is fantastic;
they were part of a big Edinburgh modern initiative
to build tower blocks and sky rises,
to be the future.
But, since the '70s and through the '80s,
and more into the '90s, funding cuts
made a difference, the community had to be more resourceful.
We’ve really returned to that space
because in the last ten years, more cuts
have prevented them perhaps sustaining
the things that they really enjoyed, community newspapers,
so we’ve introduced design at a digital level
to understand how social networking can bond
and build bridges across a community.
The disciplines involved have been about place.
Understanding how networking can help foster place.
Geography is obviously an interesting one,
history and anthropology, understanding that place is a people thing.
And then the design and the arts have come in,
particularly the digital arts,
understanding how social networking is a bit about place.
It often isn’t, it’s often about the big cloud
and we wanted to negotiate a sense of place.
But the social sciences in particular,
and geography and design, the home of us.
We incorporate design, quite carefully.
Whale Arts was one of the partners.
They have a fantastic centre in the community
where they worked on the material arts.
They designed and they carved with the community,
this wooden pole – so very, very material.
Then working with the team there as well,
but also at the Edinburgh College of Art,
we worked with PhD students to help develop
a digital infrastructure behind it.
So when we attached the QR code,
there’s a big architecture that supports the community.
Journalism dimension, a newspaper...
But also the ability to leave messages on the pole.
So the design intervention for me is the coupling
of the immaterial with this material.
The methods have been quite varied.
From my perspective, we’ve come from an Arts direction,
we’ve used a lot of co-design and participatory design.
So that meant linking up with Whale and Prospect
and initially working in the shopping centre,
and any events that the team could suggest
were good places to meet people.
We had an RA anthropologist who had good expertise
in negotiating, in offering ways in with people.
And in particular we used photographs from the past.
Prospect gave us photographs of how it used to look,
20, 15 years ago, and we used those
to evoke memories and nostalgia.
Then it was a matter of running workshops
that allowed those memories to turn into actions
for the now, for the present and the future.
Hi, I’m Alison Reeves.
I’m the creative director at Whale Arts.
We’re standing in our visual arts workshop.
We’re a community partner with the University of Edinburgh.
Hi I’m Roy McCrone.
I’m a member of staff at Prospect Community Housing.
We’re the local housing association,
and we started off this process
by rescuing the archive of the old local community newspaper,
The Sentinel.
My name is Euan Howard.
I’m a resident and volunteer in Wester Hailes.
I've lived here for 24 years.
I’m mainly involved with the Wester Hailes Health Agency
and the Job Centre for the over 50s.
Two or three of people locally, and local groups,
were looking at potential projects,
and then Euan made the breakthrough
as far as this is concerned, by making contact with Chris.
We wrote a grant, but we needed stakeholders,
so that’s where I came in.
I worked with academics who
responded to a Connected Communities theme.
It happened that this community had the best ground.
They had the scaffolding all in place,
just to link a few pieces together.
So this is a digital totem pole.
It’s digital because it has these unique QR codes.
Half of the QR codes around are for reading,
so you can read data about the local information.
There’s a Facebook site, there's lots of memories.
Some of the other cool things is it’s also writing,
so I can scan it – just like so –
and I can get information about what’s happening around the local area.
The key thing is, the design intervention,
it’s a local cloud,
which means instead of communicating all around the world,
it means people have to come to the pole.
And they know that when they leave things on the pole
they can also pick up things on the pole.
So it’s just for the locals.
Like me.
We also have here something we're very proud of
The Health Agency is involved in
a series of social history guided walks.
And when we spoke with Chris about the possibility of having
a small booklet complete with its own QR codes for each of
the nine walks, then lo and beyond, that became
another tangible outcome as well as the totem pole.
I would certainly say look for a community
that is already confident and articulate.
That has community-led organisations
who are already doing this work.
It solves hundreds of problems, I think.
I would say use your imagination and try and do new things.
I’m amazed at where we’ve got to in this
wide social history project,
as compared to where we started.
The ideas we had at the beginning have evolved and changed,
and grown enormously over the last few years.
My tip would be to challenge the academics.
They’ll have things that they’ve set their minds on,
what they want to do,
so make sure you don’t just abide by that.
We were lucky in our case, as almost everything we suggested,
Chris managed to adapt his own thinking to cater for,
and very successfully, from both our perspectives.
So, challenge the academics.
The way the applications are set up is
you must have a clear model of work packages,
time-scale and budgets.
They'll have to be prepared to throw that out.
You have to be responsive,
it is a family/organised response framework.
So planning it meticulously in a university won't work.
You’re going to have to know the community well
and we have to work this out together.
Things will go wrong, things will go right,
but this idea of the next steps, as Alison said,
it’s complicated...
The best planning won’t work. �