Air pollution has a particularly damaging effect on children. They’re still growing and breathe faster than adults do. They also live closer to the ground, where the most polluting gases from vehicles accumulate. Pollution from traffic has been linked to problems with brain development, stunted growth, respiratory conditions, cancers and 300,000 child deaths worldwide.
Children themselves are far from oblivious to all this. The school climate strikes show that young people are forcing air pollution and the climate crisis to the top of the political agenda. The strikes tell us that children demand a platform to challenge pollution in their environment. Unable to voice their concerns in school, they are forced to take radical action. What if instead there was a way to work with children in tackling air pollution and climate change?
PhD researcher Sean Peacock leads a Sense Explorers workshop. Image: Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books, photography by Richard Kenworthy
Through my research, I look for ways that we can give children the tools, the skills and the confidence to affect change in the cities they live in. With the help of teachers and my colleagues in Open Lab, we’ve come up with Sense Explorers, a toolkit of activities and resources to involve young people in transforming places and the environment.
And this summer, I’ll be delivering four free Sense Explorers workshops with Seven Stories! As part of each workshop, we’ll be exploring spaces around the Ouseburn. Using some digital tools we’ll be collecting data about air pollution, and we’ll also be asking young people to think about what their own five senses are telling them. Can they see or hear what may be causing pollution?
Sense Explorers explore the Ouseburn Valley. Image: Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books, photography by Richard Kenworthy
Then looking at this data, we’ll be asking our Sense Explorers to think about what they would do to make the Ouseburn better. I can’t wait to see what ideas they come up with!
Here’s a video about our Sense Explorers workshops at Seven Stories:
Sessions like Sense Explorers help children to learn about the future, what it holds for them, and how they can make it better. We should be showing them what they can – and should – do to make their cities less polluted places.
Urban planners and politicians are often hesitant to work with children, but they shouldn’t be – we need to embrace their creativity and passion to take radical action on air pollution and climate change. More now than ever, we need the original ideas that only children can bring.
Sean Peacock
Thanks Sean, and to The Conversation for allowing us to republish this content. The four Sense Explorers workshops are now fully booked. We are considering adding some extra sessions so do book on our waiting list (available on the event booking page) and we will let you know if spaces become available.
How can cultural organisations collaboratively develop immersive digital experiences? And how can ideas about space and place in magical realism inform more creative approaches to designing augmented reality technologies?
Many organisations in the cultural sector recognise that expanding digital capacity is a priority, but they are limited by funding, time and staff expertise to support this. The #CultureIsDigital 2018 report advocates for design-orientated digital thinking ‘to unleash the creative potential of technology’ and collaborating with technology partners is often seen as a solution for a lack of in-house resources.
Dr Tom Schofield leads an event in the Ouseburn Valley as part of the Being Human Festival 2018. Image: Newcastle University
In late 2017, Google and Apple had released new augmented reality features that allowed much more complicated interactions with real space on mobile phones. We wanted to explore whether magical realism, a literary genre that plays with the boundaries between real and imaginary spaces, could inspire new creative approaches to these new technical developments.
Seven Stories had recently acquired David Almond’s literary archive. An award-winning author of children’s and young adult books, David’s work explores ambiguous and confusing crossovers between worlds; past and present, everyday and mythical. We used this as our starting point to explore how researchers, museum professionals, digital designers, children and young people could inform new kinds of spatial interactions for AR. We wanted to experiment with a sustainable and collaborative approach to digital R&D in the context of cultural organisations.
From June to December 2018, Tom and Kim worked with Diego Trujillo Pisanty, a researcher and media artist, and Seven Stories. We led six creative workshops, some as part of the 2018 Great Exhibition of the North programme, engaging around 80 participants. During the Great Exhibition, Seven Stories delivered an artistic trail around the Ouseburn Valley featuring new writing by David Almond, and a major exhibition, ‘Where Your Wings Were’ focusing on his archive.
Families explore the Magical Reality app in the Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle. Image: Newcastle University
In the workshops, we wanted to create open environments where people could explore experimental ideas. Each workshop had a separate focus, but aimed to explore creative analogies to immersive technology – ideas of other worlds, magic, the fantastic and interdimensional – to inform the design of the app, and enhance our understanding of the value of spaces and places within David Almond’s work.
From the creative ideas generated in the workshops, we designed and built a smartphone app, Magical Reality, which leads you on a trail to find AR objects around the Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle. Research Associate Diego led the technical development and it’s now available on Android and iOS platforms. The app uses AR technology to embed digital artefacts, developed from archive materials held at Seven Stories. We used an experimental and collaborative design approach to see how the knowledge and imaginative ideas of the different parties involved in the project could inform the development.
Here’s a video of the app in action:
There were many interesting things we learnt from evaluating this project, which was supported by Research Associate Dr Gabi Arrigoni; not least that the stakeholders involved consider innovation very differently. For the research team, the creative process informing the app was seen as the most significant contribution to the field; Seven Stories valued new ways of engaging with their audiences and connecting archive material to places; whereas digital professionals were interested in digital innovation around the app’s use of AR.
As Vital North Partnership Manager, one of the things I found most fascinating was seeing different kinds of knowledge and experience being brought together through the four workshops I took part in, and the way in which the research team created open spaces for knowledge exchange. I also really valued the way that this project moved beyond transactional digital commissioning and towards more experimental and open-ended R&D within a museum setting, which mirrors some of the processes Seven Stories uses as we develop our programmes and exhibitions.
Since we finished our work on Children’s Magical Realism for New Spatial Interactions: AR and Archives in December, we’ve been busy! Firstly, Dr Tom Schofield and Professor Kim Reynolds have been busy working on academic outputs. Kim has given a paper on ‘Augmenting Almond’ at the University of Western Australia, and will be presenting this project in June in Berlin, and October at the University of Buckingham. Tom will be presenting a paper as part of Designing Interactive Systems 2019 in June in San Diego – as one of the most prestigious conferences for interaction design in the world, we’re very excited!
Secondly, Tom and Seven Stories were successful in a bid for AHRC Follow on Funding for an extension project, Embedding Magic: AR and Outreach. This will extend the work we began our original workshops by developing these into a programme that Seven Stories’ Creative Learning and Engagement team will be delivering with Research Associate Dr Miranda Iossifidis in the East End of Newcastle, empowering children and young people to connect with the places and spaces within their community. We’re also planning a short series of workshops for cultural and digital organisations to present this collaborative process in early summer. Watch this space!
Children have fascinating insights into the places they live in, and Seven Stories are interested in how the families that visit them feel about their locality. Yet traditional approaches to urban planning are quite exclusive (and not massively creative) when it comes to consulting and involving children and young people. So what about new and alternative methods?
Today I’m exploring JigsAudio, a research project led by Alexander Wilson, a doctoral trainee in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics at Open Lab. Zander’s research interrogates the intersections between digital technology, design, human-computer interaction and town planning, with a focus on alternative tools and methods to participation.
Zander was first introduced to me when I was working with his academic supervisor Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones and Newcastle City Futures around our Big Draw events in October 2016. Together, we saw an opportunity to combine planning, drawing, and digital technology. Drawing could allow Seven Stories’ visitors to overcome some of the traditional barriers to getting involved with planning.
We drew on RFID enabled wooden jigsaw pieces and recorded messages about the future of the city. Image: Newcastle University.
From that initial conversation, Zander and his Digital Civics colleagues came up with JigsAudio. It combines drawing and colouring in jigsaw pieces, which the children and families visiting Seven Stories are familiar with, with something new: a device which allowed the children to record an audio message about their jigsaw piece. The pieces and their recordings are then combined to create a digital version of the jigsaw online.
JigsAudio’s first test was during the Big Draw in October 2016 and formed part of a range of drop in activities offered that weekend around Newcastle City Futures. Zander said, “A colourful puzzle came back with many varied visions of Newcastle and Gateshead. A five-hour barge trip along the Tyne and a colourful new bridge across the Tyne – painted in green, yellow, black, blue and purple – were just two of the ideas that emerged.”
Following that, Seven Stories also worked with Zander on a second JigsAudio activity for Summer 2017 around their Aliens Love Underpants exhibition, asking children to design and talk about alien planets and reflect on what they value about their own. For Zander: “I’m amazed at the effort the children put into their alien’s planet. It’s really interesting to see that they have such a strong sense of what is important to where they live. As well as a few aliens, we got something that’s really valuable and will hopefully lead to children getting more of a say in how places change. We’ve been underplaying their ability to understand some of the issues planning is facing and hearing their ideas has been an eye-opening exercise. It’s been a fantastic project.”
The Aliens Love Underpants JigsAudio activity at Seven Stories. Image: Alexander Wilson.
So what were Zander’s research findings? He found:
“That drawing and talking was effective at getting people to communicate complicated and elaborate visions that might not be easily communicated through a single media.”
“The initial low-tech appearance of the activity encouraged engagement with JigsAudio”. This was particularly important for Seven Stories’ youngest visitors, and they loved the tactile nature of the jigsaw itself. I noticed that the children really enjoyed adding their piece into the constellation of planets, for example!
“Participants were interested in how the JigsAudio device worked and wanted to take part in the activity.” This was backed up by Seven Stories Santander University Intern, Emma, who facilitated the Aliens Love Underpants JigsAudio activity: “You have to watch [the device] quite a lot because… it was quite an interesting thing for the kids; they were picking it up!”
“Through the use of JigsAudio, an artefact that represented a group’s feelings towards a topic grew.” You can see the finished digital Jigsaudio for the Big Draw 2016 here and for Aliens Love Underpants here.
The completed Big Draw JigsAudio puzzle, available at: http://jigsaudio.com/thebigdraw.html. Image: JigsAudio
For Seven Stories, using JigsAudio was an interesting way of finding out what their youngest visitors see and think about the place that they live in, and their visions of alternative spaces.
And for Zander, “I’m thinking about how we can use drawing and talking with other topics, and how we might put together a toolkit for children to make their own devices. If you’re interested in having a go with the device, or if you have your own project you’d like to use JigsAudio in, please do get in touch!”
Thanks to Zander for his help with this post! To find out more about JigsAudio, visit: http://jigsaudio.com/
The seminar was suggested by Sage Gateshead’sDave Camlin. It gave us the chance to reflect on our time working together on Northern Bridge so far, and “to explore some of the tensions and opportunities inherent in collaborative approaches to the generation of new knowledge.”
Newcastle University’s Professor Mike Rossington addresses the Northern Bridge Ecologies of Knowledge seminar. Image courtesy of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
Of course, there are tensions; when you bring together any group of academic institutions, or cultural organisations, there is competition – for students, for audiences, for funding. And although learning is at the heart of what both universities and cultural venues do, the processes through which we generate knowledge are quite different. We speak different languages. We have different drivers. Working in collaboration requires negotiating all of these factors.
Another tension which formed a focus of conversation during the day was the inequality of engagement with the arts. The Warwick Commission’s Enriching Britain, Culture, Creative and Growth Report states that “the wealthiest, better educated and least ethnically diverse 8% of the population forms the most culturally active segment of all”. How to reach those beyond that 8% is certainly a challenge.
But democratising culture and knowledge is becoming increasingly important in both the higher education and cultural sectors. The Research Excellence Framework emphasises the impact of research ‘beyond academia’; Arts Council England encourages the organisations they fund to reach more demographically diverse audiences.
Dave Camlin (Sage Gateshead) opens the seminar. Image courtesy of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
From my experience of working on the Vital North Partnership between Newcastle University and Seven Stories, collaboration holds exciting opportunities. Partnership helps to make our activities more interesting and diverse. At the intersections between universities, cultural organisations and communities, we can draw on our collective expertise to create new kinds of shared knowledge. And with increasing pressure on arts budgets, we can pool our resources and become more efficient.
I explored the Vital North Partnership’s unique ecology at the seminar, giving a Pecha Kucha presentation:
It was also interesting to reflect on what role Northern Bridge, as a Doctoral Training Partnership, has as part of our shared ecology. I think the ways in which universities and arts organisations collaborate is changing. We are asking different questions, and having new conversations. I work at this boundary – and I’m interested to see where we’re headed next.
The MA in Creative Arts Practice programme director, Dr Tom Schofield, suggested the collaboration as part of an existing module around Enterprise and Research Methods. Dr Schofield said: “In our programme, we think about professional practice in terms of the way that our work makes sense in public. What does it mean to work with others? What do you need to make your work work in this environment?” This fitted with Seven Stories’ commitment to supporting emerging arts professionals, and presenting art and engaging audiences are core activities for the organisation.
Following a successful application for Teaching Development Funding from the University, module leaders Dr Schofield, Tim Shaw and Professor John Bowers, the Seven Stories team and I discussed a programme of activities that would lead to the MA in Creative Arts Practice students presenting a new artwork for The Late Shows 2017, when Seven Stories offers free entry late into the evening and attracts a large and diverse audience. The starting point was collaborating to come up with a suitable commission brief for the students to respond to.
MA in Creative Arts Practice students at Seven Stories for a site visit. Image: Newcastle University
In March, the MA in Creative Arts Practice students came on a site visit to Seven Stories, where Seven Stories’ staff explained the commission brief, talked about our experience of The Late Shows, and the students had the opportunity to explore the different spaces at Seven Stories. They even took part in a story time!
The students had around a month to respond to the brief with a costed artistic proposal. All the proposals submitted showed creativity, and the students had clearly thought about Seven Stories as an organisation, and what might be suitable for our spaces and audiences.
Will Finn and Rosie Calvert perform at Seven Stories.
Seven Stories chose to commission two of the students, Lewis Brown and Mike Hirst, to deliver new works. We worked closely with the students as they planned their Late Shows activity over the weeks leading up to Friday 19th May, so that all of the partners were fully prepared.
Lewis curated a series of pop-up musical and poetry performances around Seven Stories, which responded to the building’s spaces and themes. Lewis said: “With Seven Stories’ support, I was able to facilitate a diverse programme of local performers popping up throughout the venue for guests to discover. Working with Seven Stories has been a pleasure and a great opportunity to apply my creative practice on a larger scale than I ever had previously!”
Dr Schofield observed that “audiences formed naturally around the events and they gelled nicely with the spaces… the performers referenced parts of the exhibition around them, using props and standing in different places, which contributed significantly to the integrated feel of the performances.” From Seven Stories’ perspective, Lewis’ programme really brought the bookshop, café and galleries to life. Operations Manager Jayne Nicholson said: “It was all very well planned – the whole building was buzzing!”
Mike presented an interactive artwork in Seven Stories’ Studio space, inspired by early children’s books. Over the course of the evening, he pulled together social media posts about Seven Stories and The Late Shows to create new chapbooks, which he printed and constructed with visitors. For Mike, taking part in The Late Shows “allowed me to fuse contemporary experience with archive content to create new and exciting possibilities.”
Mike’s artwork was complemented by a display of historic chapbooks from Seven Stories’ Collection, led by Collections Officer, Paula Wride. Paula said: “Having the old and new chapbooks together really worked well – and it was the first time we’ve really explored chapbooks at Seven Stories.” Dr Schofield echoes that sentiment: “Mike’s work felt like a very natural complement to the Studio activities. The work took on a recursive aspect as people started to tweet pictures and descriptions of the chapbooks themselves which were then reincluded!”
Mike with Professor John Bowers and Seven Stories Chief Executive Kate Edwards.
From the perspective of the MA in Creative Arts Practice, this filled the programme’s objectives by encouraging the students to respond to the challenges of a space and event format. Dr Schofield said: “I thought they stage managed the evening extremely competently and really added to the event at Seven Stories. It was a great success.”
Over 800 people visited over the course of the evening and Seven Stories were very happy with how the event went. Chief Executive Kate Edwards said: “What a fab time we had at The Late Shows! Loads of happy visitors, a great atmosphere and something going on everywhere you looked. The MA in Creative Arts Practice students were great!”
Lewis performs in the Michael Morpurgo gallery at Seven Stories for The Late Shows 2017.
Experimenting in the Studio. Image: Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books, Photography by Richard Kenworthy
Seven Stories’ mission is to celebrate and share children’s books, and there are some amazing children’s books all about science. From books like Carnovsky and Rachel Williams’ Illuminature, where you can discover different animals using a three colour RGB lens, to books like Andrea Beaty and David Roberts’ Rosie Revere, Engineer, which comes with engineering activity kits, there are lots of titles which encourage children to think about science and provide STEM role models.
The Street Scientists at Seven Stories. Image: Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books, Photography by Richard Kenworthy
When I heard that Seven Stories were thinking about taking part in British Science Week, I recommended that they connected up with Newcastle University’s Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering. What better way to explore science with our visitors than inviting some real scientists to celebrate with us?
String theory? Image: Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books, Photography by Richard Kenworthy
So on Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th March 2017, the Street Science team took over the Studio at Seven Stories to celebrate British Science Week 2017. The Street Scientists are a group of current students studying STEM subjects at Newcastle University. They bring science to life using ordinary household items – bottles of water, drills, toys… even toilet seats!
Happy British Science Week! Image: Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books, Photography by Richard Kenworthy
Street Scientists James, Jenny, Kathryn, Nina, Pete, Jessica, Lysander, Nimarta, Phoebe and Rachel talked to our visitors and showed them lots of fun experiments. I think it’s evident from these photos how much fun the families had and how engaged even our youngest visitors were – a very happy British Science Week!
Pecha Kuchas are short, visual presentations. As you talk, you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. Your slides change automatically. And they’re more than a little tricky to deliver…
The Vital North Partnership (+ 19 other ways Newcastle University and Seven Stories are collaborating) is exactly what the title suggests: a presentation about 20 current Partnership projects. And what are those projects? Well, watch the video and find out!
With thanks to Jeff Wilson from the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, who produced this video.
This digital age of ours poses a challenge to both museums and higher education. How can museums present physical collections digitally? And how can academic research into these collections engage the Google Cardboard generation?
The content for the experience was provided by Kim Reynolds, Professor of Children’s Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. Kim wanted to produce a digital exhibition based on her research into Seven Stories’ Catherine Storr archive. Discussing this with the Seven Stories Collections Team, it quickly became apparent that Kim’s ambitions for the project were to do something really new.
The Mirror Image Ghost. Image: Newcastle University
The result? The Catherine Storr Experience explores the unsettling novel of Storr’s Marianne Dreams (1958), and the house that Marianne draws. Using the context of Marianne’s room, the augmented reality experience introduces a number of Storr’s books and illustrators, as well as some aspects of her life. The experience allows you to explore different objects, characters and settings by moving your smartphone or cursor.
It uses the very latest in WebVR technology. I haven’t seen anything like this yet in digital collections, so I asked Dan about the technological innovation:
“This is new and experimental technology, which is on the edge of a breakthrough into the mainstream. It has the ability to take information that has traditionally been displayed in a flat, 2D way and literally add another dimension to it!
Websites have the great advantage of allowing the viewer to navigate the information at their own pace. Video and TV captivate and engage the viewer. This sort of experience combines the best of both; I like to think of it as a guided tour with the ability for you to ‘ask’ questions along the way.”
Inside the house of Marianne Dreams. Image: Newcastle University
Throughout The Catherine Storr Experience you can spot illustrations, photographs and other items from the Seven Stories Collection. Some of the materials included in the experience also relate to Storr’s personal life and were kindly loaned by her family, extending the Seven Stories material. The project has also enabled Seven Stories to digitise all of their Storr holdings so this is available to readers and researchers around the world.
From Seven Stories’ perspective, Kris commented that this partnership had brought a new dimension to their digital collections:
“It was interesting to see how a group of talented people from outside the museums and heritage sector were able to respond to the challenge of representing an archive in a new way; Kim was able to bring her expertise to write the content, and Dan and Tom were able to envision a unique platform to present it. It will be intriguing to see what people make of The Catherine Storr Experience and the additional content on our website.”
‘Marianne draws a house, and the house is Marianne.’ Image: Newcastle University
And I’ll leave it to Kim to have the final word:
“Working with colleagues in Culture Lab and Seven Stories made it possible to experiment with new ways of presenting archival mterial and reaching out to audiences all over the world. It required new ways of writing, and Dan and Tom approached the task in adventurous ways that re-engaged me with the material. It was an exciting and challenging – in the best possible ways – collaboration.”
Over 500 people visited Seven Stories over the course of our Big Draw weekend. 2016’s STEAM Powered Big Draw Festival aims to inspire illustrators everywhere to explore creative innovation, enterprise, digital technologies and the arts through drawing.
Now, I think the views of the children and families visiting Seven Stories are pretty important here. After all, they’re the ones who’ll be living and working in Newcastle in fifty years’ time!
So what will Newcastle and Seven Stories look like in 2065? Here’s what Seven Stories’ visitors think…
Building Newcastle Gateshead
Newcastle Gateshead in 2065. Image: Newcastle University
Over the course of the weekend, children and families added to our large map of Newcastle and Gateshead to create their vision of Newcastle in 2065.
And their creativity was amazing! Visitors built homes, cultural, sports and science venues, businesses, hotels, transport systems, power stations and several bridges. In fact, the children organically created pretty much everything you’d need in a future city.
I was pleased to see they thought the Angel of the North would still be there, and Seven Stories too!
The house of the future…?
The house of the future. Image: Newcastle University
Children drew on (and played in!) our large 3D house of the future. What does this tell us? Perhaps that houses in the future will be more colourful and allow for personalisation. We’ll continue to build in green technologies, and graffiti won’t be going away any time soon…!
The streets of 2065
Designing a new Northumberland Street. Image: Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books
Dr Emine Thompson and students from Northumbria University came in to run a ‘Your City, You Design It!’ workshop. We looked at the streets of Newcastle in 3D and then participants designed a new Northumberland Street using SketchUp. It’s going to look pretty different in 2065…
A big jigsaw for the Big Draw
We drew on RFID enabled wooden jigsaw pieces and recorded messages about the future of the city. Image: Newcastle University.
Zander Wilson of Open Lab at Newcastle University provided a fun jigsaw activity. The children coloured in wooden RFID enabled jigsaw pieces, before recording a message about their hopes for the future of the city. Zander will be combining these to make a digital jigsaw – I’m excited to see the finished result!
The future of Seven Stories
A new plan for Seven Stories. Image: Newcastle University
Our last two activities of the weekend were all about planning the future of Seven Stories. Throughout the weekend, children could draw a new blueprint for our galleries, and Teresa Strachan and the YES Planning students at Newcastle University came to deliver a drop-in workshop all about urban planning. Here’s a plan one of the children came up with!
The children came up with so many interesting ideas about what Newcastle Gateshead will be like in 2065 – I’m looking forward to seeing what changes the future holds!
