Keynote: Good design is democratic — how the smartest cities are engaging citizens to innovate and help shape their environment.
Tim Griggs
What if cities saw their role as providing a platform for others to innovate? With today’s technology, social media and the rise of digital platforms, there’s an opportunity to involve more people in design, decision-making and the operation of cities. These tools can empower citizens to give their opinion on large-scale design projects and to drive forward their own ideas.
If you’re designing new solutions or components of cities or spaces, we believe that you need to make sure they meet the needs and expectations of as many different stakeholders as possible. Arup has helped a number of cities to engage citizens and councils in the gathering of sensor data from across the city to inform people and businesses, and ultimately to shape the design of their environment. In Christchurch New Zealand, alongside physical reconstruction of the city following the 2011 earthquakes, the rebuilding has allowed a digital opportunity. Arup helped to set up a social enterprise with the council that focused on using sensors to gather information on the city’s environment. Citizens played a key role and were engaged to ‘sense the city’ by using their asthma inhalers to monitor air pollution and paper-based sensors to measure their quality of water the city’s rivers and then report the results through their phones. Through this community engagement, citizens helped shaped city services and ultimately the future design of the built environment.
Tim leads Arup’s UK Digital Services business in the North, and has extensive Systems Integration and Digital Transformation experience having worked for a number of Tier 1 Systems Integrators and IT Consultancies. He background is in aviation and airport systems, having worked on major programmes at London Heathrow’s Terminal 5, Dublin Terminal 2, New Doha International in Qatar, Muscat International in Oman and the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority.
Tim sits on a number of industry boards and Digital bodies across the UK, is a member of the Institute of Leadership and Management and has an MBA from Manchester Business School.
Hack The Home - Re-thinking home adaptations.
Elaine James
Hack the home was a meeting of minds between hackers, designers, developers and disabled service users. It costs up to £30,000 to adapt someone's home and we wanted people to think about things in a different way. We teamed up with Future Gov and Enabled by design to work with the different service users and prototype solutions that they really wanted in their homes and that they could actually use! What was designed?? Well we had an iDrobe to help a chap with early onset Alzheimers, a voice activated perching stool and a tall garden proving easy access for wheelchair users.
The Ultimate Smart Home
Stuart Turner
Stuart talks about how he combines low cost consumer electronics, the internet of things, healthy building and Open Design principles to work and live in his accessible, flexible, affordable smart home.
Stuart Turner was a computer science undergraduate when he began to lose the ability to control his body. Today he is a quadriplegic who has created a voice-activated system that enables him to code – hands-free.
Stuart has beta-tested software such as the Alfred productivity app for Mac and Apple’s iOS and OSX operating systems. In 2013 Turner joined the Robots for Humanity project in America, testing accessible browser interfaces for different robots. He later founded robotsandcake.org to connect roboticists and disabled people in the EU.
Digital Tools and Dementia
Kathryn Grace
Kathryn is a professional Service Design & Innovation consultant coming from a design background - she has been called a digital OT (Occupational Therapist). Wearing these two hats she will share learnings of how interventions in the home developed over time - a variety of digital and non-digital solutions. Kathryn will share the outline of what works and doesn't work digitally to keep people independent and connected from their own homes.
Kathryn Grace was a family carer for 6 years 2009 - 2015, managing care and services for her elderly father who had Alzheimer’s (and other complex conditions), keeping him safe, happy and independent in his own home.
The role of the artist in the development of new technology
Dan Powers
IOU is a producing organisation with 39 years’ experience making original work across art forms. IOU creates original and unpredictable art works to engage audiences and artists to change perspectives and share in curiosity and wonder. Dan Powers’ of IOU discusses the role of the artist in the development and use and of new technology.
As Technical Manager of IOU, Dan is responsible for the company’s buildings and infrastructure, and also for the delivery of its touring shows. Dan can be often found holed up in a Premier Inn, peering into a laptop screen…
Outside of the company Dan is a freelance technical consultant, focussing on audio-visual control and integration within the live Arts sector.
Open Source Circular Economy Days
Erica Purvis
Representing the Open Source Circular Economy Days, Erica will share the activities and insights from co-developing, co-organizing and taking part in a grass-roots global design event and emerging voice on open source principles for a circular economy.
From Shenzhen to Berlin, Chicago to London, the OSCEdays are about catalyzing ideas, finding common ground, understanding, learning and growing together through open collaboration across sectors and disciplines. They are also about co-creating the next steps!
What happens when you open up an event and create a platform that enables people to not just take part but help to build, shape it’s identity and populate it’s content with their own wonderful projects, ideas, knowledge and experience. What’s more focus it on exploring open source principles and solutions for a Circular Economy.
After laying the basic foundations, this is exactly what the Open Source Circular Economy days (OSCEdays) set out to do. Grassroots and voluntarily organised, local organisers came together from the 11-15 June 2015 in 33 cities, spanning 25 countries around the world. The days took many forms and showcased diverse collaborations, approaches, and outcomes. In London, participants, from a variety of backgrounds, were introduced to challenges identified by leaders such as The Great Recovery, Open Energy Monitor, The Rubbish Diet, and the Knowledge Transfer Network.
It wasn’t just about the Days. The OSCEdays are about catalyzing ideas, finding common ground, understanding, learning and growing together through open collaboration across sectors and disciplines.
Trained as a Product Design Engineer, Erica now specialises in building in sustainable design thinking and practice with start-ups, NGO’s and global businesses. She aims to raise awareness around the consequences of design and challenge people to address root causes and design for real positive impact. She combines technical product development experience with strategy, building collaborations and translating vision into practical steps to take. Listening, questioning, inspiring and caring.
Currently Erica is the Central Research Laboratory’s Community Manager (a new London based Hardware Incubator), while continuing with a variety of research projects as TechnicalNature. Including Circular Makespaces with Sustain RCA, the Open Source Circular Economy Days, London Circular Jam, and voluntary workshops in schools with the Greater London IMechE.
Using tech to reduce isolation in older people
Paul Butcher
£50,000 fund - tackle isolation in older people - part of the project should explore innovative ways of alleviating isolation and loneliness. As such, there was a digital development fund of £50k allocated to do this. The projects steering group agreed that in order to decide on what ‘digital solution’ to implement they would like to hold a challenge event
Paul has worked in public health for over 25 years mainly within the NHS both in frontline and managerial positions. This work has been within the North West and Yorkshire and Humber regions.
Paul was appointed Director for Public Health for Calderdale Council in October 2013.
He genuinely welcomed the move of public health functions to the local authority as it presents a huge opportunity to influence key determinants of health and utilise the local political mandate, community networks and local authority powers to promote health and reduce health inequalities.
The ‘austerity’ agenda has meant we have to look at organisational transformation, use of new technologies and consider how we do more with less to support both population well-being and ensure we tackle health inequality
Very recently Paul has been appointed to work with the Academic Health sciences Network on behalf of the Yorkshire and Humber Directors of Public Health with specific reference to digital developments. The initial two programmes looking at workplace health and improving air quality through use of new media, technology and creating social movements for health.
13.10-13.50 | IoT working to improve your health, your bus journey, and save money and the planet
Damon Hart Davis
OpenTRV thinks that making the right things smart but simple, brainy but bling-free, will make measurable differences to climate change and health, from making your radiator valves clever to giving the bus company a real-time clue as to when their customers actually need more or fewer buses laid on, but only if the price and privacy are right.
Damon Hart-Davis is lead on the OpenTRV open source project created following his 2012 presentation to DECC's smart heating workshop. He has freelanced in technology for over 30 years, delivering mission-critical products from design to live in the City for more than 20 of those, and has founded and been involved in several start-ups over that time with his creations seen on TV, the Web, and his pioneering Internet Service Provider helping crack open that market more than 20 years ago. A previous virtual/on-line credit-card company start-up that he co-founded as CTO, Ixaris, turns over ~GBP10m.
Powering Down - a co-operative, open approach to energy efficiency and smart grids.
Jonathan Atkinson & Matt Fawcett
Powering Down - reducing the energy we use in our homes - is the most effective way of lowering carbon emissions and reduces our reliance on dirty technologies such as coal and gas. But to date, Government policy and the Big Six energy providers have failed to deliver effective and affordable routes to household energy efficiency improvements.
In this absence, a co-produced approach, involving householders and small scale practitioners has the potential to fill the gap. Carbon Co-op, a community benefit society based in Greater Manchester, has delivered a series of innovative projects to establish new methods of community-led carbon saving, from whole house retrofit to simple energy assessments and now the use of smart meters and grids.
Throughout their development they have sought to use open source technologies and open methods of development, collaborating closely with partners OpenEnergyMonitor
Jonathan co-founded Carbon Co-op, collaborating with technical experts URBED on the project that became Carbon Co-op, testing the idea that reductions in household energy usage could be brought about quicker and with greater social benefit through collaboration and co-operation.
Matt Fawcett worked on community engagement for Carbon Co-op - developing the various community workshop programmes and producing written materials such as the Carbon Coop Manual and the little red book. More recently he has been involved in the open source monitoring and home assessment side as well as contributing to the new smart grids project.
Introducing Yarn: A tale of community storytelling & collaborative design.
Imran Ali
Using collaborative design and community storytelling to reboot institutional heritage archives (Yarn is an outcome of the AHRC-funded Pararchive research programme.)
Imran Ali is a founding partner of CARBON:imagineering, a boutique digital innovation and R&D practice, exploring the impact of emerging technologies. He is also a cofounder of LSx, curating and producing technology industry events across West Yorkshire.
Previously, Imran established the Technology Research team for Orange UK, was part of the advisory boards of O’Reilly’s ETel conference, the mobile messaging startup Treasuremytext and, the eComm conference, as well as serving on the boards of venture-backed ensembli, bmedi@ and two years as a trustee of the Impressions Gallery. Imran has also served as conference director of Manchester's FutureEverything festival.
Most recently Imran became a trustee of the IOU Theatre and moved to Bailiff Bridge, becoming inadvertently committed to Calderdale :)
Let's fix our relationship with electronics
Ugo Vallauri
Electronic waste is one of the fastest growing streams of waste in many countries across the world, including the UK. We consume more and more electrical and electronic devices, rarely knowing much about the impact that manufacturing them has on the environment. The solution? We need to rethink our relationship with electronics, learn to buy for longevity and understand that every time we choose maintenance and repair over recycling we make a positive impact, and learn something too
Ugo Vallauri is the co-founder of the Restart Project, a London-based social enterprise encouraging people to repair and use their electronics longer to prevent waste. Inspiration for his current work came from his previous experiences as a researcher in the use of information and communication technologies in Kenya and around East Africa.
How to ride a paradigm shift when no one knows what’s on t’other side…
Esko Reinikainen
If we accept that we are currently in the midst of a paradigm shift, driven by revolutionary technological advances, history tells us that sweeping changes in our political, social, and economic organisation will follow in the wake. This is going to have major implications to the boundary area where the citizen and the state currently interact. Let’s be honest, that space is still largely governed by mental models that were birthed during the industrial revolution, and we are now concerned with successfully adapting to the transition from the information age to the networked age.
Our machine metaphor mental models are no longer adequate to guide how we can adapt the provision of public services into the future. If we can’t let go of our obsolete mindsets and we get it wrong, we risk a new generation of ‘dark satanic mills’. This talk will explore emerging technologies, principles, and mental models that may just give us an edge, a shot at a great leap forward in delivering public value and citizen centric services in a future no one can predict today.
Esko Reinikainen is co-founder of The Satori Lab, a Cardiff based startup that helps organisations navigate change. Their primary mission is to fix government and public services. The change he is most concerned with is the complex transitions required when society undergoes a transformational paradigm shift, in this case from the Information Age to the Networked Age.
He has been called by turns ‘a heretic’ and ‘a visionary leader with a social conscience’. Over his career he has spent time in the military, as a theatre director, in cultural administration, as a local government officer, and various hacking disciplines.
His current practice was prototyped during his architecture of the Monmouthshire Intrapreneurship School as part of the Nesta Creative Councils innovation programme, and is further being refined through innovation work with a range of clients including housing associations, the Cabinet Office, and city governments around the UK.
Drawing from a range of intellectual resources from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) to Aalto University (Finland) and collaborative practice in international networks, he is developing tools, methods and processes that help organisations undergo radical change. If you need to understand how the confluence of complex adaptive systems, peer based modes of production, agile development, user centred design, culture transformation and radical innovation matter to the survival of your organisation, you may just want to invite him for lunch…
Welcome
Merran McRae, Chief Executive of Calderdale Council
Merran McRae sets the scene for the day, providing a brief introduction to some of the challenges faced by local authorities today and how the open data movement can help to address these.
Merran McRae has been the Chief Executive of Calderdale Council since October 2012. She has a professional background in housing management and, more recently, social care, holding positions as Chief Executive at a Housing ALMO and Director of Adult Social Care within a Local Authority. She has also led strategic services focussed on museums and cultural services, creative arts, and leisure services, as well as organisational development and change programmes.
Merran has a degree in History and a Masters of Business Administration, as well as professional qualifications in housing and training and development. She has held positions as a Non-Executive Director in an NHS acute trust, and was on the executive council of the national Association of Directors of Adult Social Care (ADASS). She has also been a school governor.
