WHAT WE DO

We're a non-profit research, design and development organisation based in the UK (Cornwall). We mostly work on environmental and social projects, typically (but not exclusively) with universities, charities/non-profits, and councils.

Some buzzwords for things we can help with: Citizen science, community technology, participatory science and technology (including facilitation), game design, decision support tools, software, hardware, data visualisation, illustration, design, public engagement, research impact, civic involvement, open science/data, appropriate technology.

We like figuring out new ways to do complicated bits of research, making complex stuff easier or more accessible, and helping to involve or reach wider communities in interesting, respectful and mutually beneficial ways. We do this in lots of ways, whether that’s by designing a new piece of open source and low cost research equipment, making an online game or installation to understand a scientific concept or help solve a research question, building an app to give people access to previously inaccessible data and help them make decisions, or running events to help people work better together across boundaries.

All our work is open source*, and much of it is rooted in rural issues, rather than being city-centric. One of our biggest motivations is making knowledge more equitably distributed. We're used to designing for unusual or difficult situations, and have built things for places with no power or internet, where hardware might be trampled by elephants or fall in the sea. We hear about people using our work all around the world because it’s all freely available to use and modify.

Check out our 2024 annual review.

HOW TO WORK WITH US

Drop us an email if you'd like to chat about a project! These are some of the ways we can work together:

• Research Projects We support and collaborate on other people's research (and other) projects, coming up with ideas, contributing to writing the funding bids, embedding 'impact' and 'public engagement' in ways that truly benefit the research itself and those involved, or leading sections/work packages of the research. We also run our own research and development projects, usually grant funded, and are registered to lead and join consortia for EU funded projects as a research organisation (PIC 925548878).
• Fellowships We currently host a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. This offers a very different research experience to fellowships hosted at universities - with no publication metrics, funding targets or teaching requirements. We are also happy to share hosting of fellowships with other organisations/institutions.
• Other Project Bids We lead and collaborate on projects that aren't research based, for example for Arts Council and National Lottery calls, and can support people to put their bids in.
• Commissions We take commissions from clients, and work on large scale projects with some of the world's most famous organisations, like the Deutsches Museum (Munich), Natural History Museum (London), and Eden Project (Cornwall), as well as for funders and numerous universities.
• Teaching & Workshops We teach for universities all around the world, on citizen science, public engagement, critical technology, programming and electronics. We develop participatory workshops, either for an organisation's own staff or to bring together different types of participants.

USING OUR THINGS

We have some equipment, tools, and event items that can be borrowed or used in our studio by local organisations or community groups. There is a list available which we keep updated.

If you'd like to use any of our online things for your own purposes (like teaching or museum exhibitions), you're absolutely free to. It's really nice if you can let us know if you do this. If you'd like us to modify something we've made to make it work for a specific purpose, just get in touch.

OUR VALUES

We’re a non-profit, which means we have no shareholders to keep wealthy. We have a board of non-executive directors who keep an eye on how we do things. We make everything open source and open access so it’s freely available for anyone to use for their own purposes*. If it’s public funded, it should be available to all. We use the concept of appropriate technology in our work, which means we make things that are understandable, fixable, and can be repurposed. Wherever possible, the people who the projects are for are directly involved in the design process. We see co-design as entirely integral to how we work.

Every decision we make is grounded in the reality that climate and ecological breakdown are changing everything, and 'business as usual' is for the history books. We've had a no-flights policy since 2014, work in a carbon negative building, use ethical banking and an ethical pension scheme, run our website and projects on renewable energy powered servers, only cater events using small local businesses and almost always vegan, and have e-cargo bikes for local work-related transport. For accounting and auditing, we work with the Third Sector Accountancy, who have similar values.

We also take privacy seriously, which is an integral for climate action and justice. We use end-to-end encryption for internal communications and are happy to use it with anyone who is ready to.

You can find our more recent code on GitLab and our older projects on GitHub (we switched over because of human rights issues), and you can find our all company documents online: Companies House, Articles of Association, Policy Documents and Health and Safety (feel free to use these for setting up your own organisation, and if you spot anything you think we could improve, don't hesitate to tell us).

*there's been one exception to our open source policy since 2014 - Midimutant, it's complicated! This one isn't public funded so at least the ethics of it not being open aren't so bad.