Interactivos?'12 Dublin Workshop: Advisors' Approaches

Approach by John Lynch:

"The theme in for the Interactivos'12 at Sceience Gallery, could not be more exciting. “Hack the City: Current and Future Needs” will put the canvas of our urban landscape under the knife over the course of the workshop and hacklab. For millennia, cities have been a mishmash of planning, governance, co- operation and emergent behaviour, but also a breeding ground for hacks, guerrilla interventions and improvised products and services.

Dublin is no different. It’s very history, culture, architecture and infrastructure lends it a character totally unique in the world and provides a wealth of opportunity for invention and intervention during the course of our work.

As a native of Dublin, I’m excited to see the concepts submitted through the open call, and to watch as they are developed in a city that is alive with creative energy but also going through a period of immense change.

I look forward to identifying needs and opportunities in the city and refining concepts through prototyping and testing with Dubliner’s themselves. As a user-centred designer I believe the true meaning of the word 'city' is as a collective noun for 'citizens' - what is a city without it’s people? I want to put Dubliner’s at the heart of the work, and to surprise and delight in the process."

Approach by Carolina García Cataño:

"Hack the City is an extremely relevant topic right now, as we view cities transforming through "revolutions". In 2011 we saw changes in the essence of cities, arising out of their core, in Arab and European countries, as well as the USA. Those changes were due in part to taking over public space, redefining that space based on principles that would create different relationships, as people said what kind of change they wanted. The first place where they did so was in public squares, that part of the city they passed through every day but which did not bring them together. 

Cities have been hijacked by offices, by those who decide how urban planning and development should be carried out and what should happen in each space, whether they fill it with designs or leave it abandoned. But in 2011 we witnessed how "hack the city" took place, how people hacked the city to adapt it to their needs, how they created functional micro-cities.

Those micro-cities not only fulfil certain practical requirements. They also defined how to be together, as space became inhabitable, technologies were in the foreground: live streaming, smart phones, computers, projectors, sound, etc.  And even in cases such as Egypt, where Internet connections were cut, thanks to the hackers at Telecomix, the door opened up again. Technology is ours and it supports collective processes.

A future city will have the knowledge of all persons, set to work at small urban laboratories, spaces where we can meet to redefine not only the city but also our lives. Large factories will disappear, giving way to highly technological small laboratories, leaving planned obsolescence behind and making society sustainable. These processes of creating and reinventing the city are in everyone's hands."

The workshop at Science Gallery is part of Studiolab, a 3-year Europe-wide initiative that merges the artist's studio with the research lab. Funded by the EC Seventh Framework Programme in 2011, Studiolab is a network that provides a platform for creative projects that bridge divides between science, art and design.