NOTES

Notes on the process we used to design the award winning Local Climate Adaptation Tool for the European Centre for Environment and Human Health at the University of Exeter and Cornwall Council.

The Climate Challenge Cup included finalists from across the US and UK and celebrated existing partnerships between research organisations, civic authorities and local communities. The Local Climate Adaptation Tool was was developed with researchers from Exeter University and Cornwall Council and showcased at COP26 in the Green Zone.

You can try it for yourself here: Local Climate Adaptation Tool

We've been looking for inspiration on creative ways to publicly display/sonify air pollution data, and have put together this short post to showcase some inventive ways that other people/organisations have chosen to visualise/sonify data.

Poor air quality is an increasing global concern and has significant health impacts. For researchers and citizen scientists to monitor air quality effectively, they need access to air pollution sensors that collect reliable data. Commercial air quality monitoring devices are often expensive, and so many citizen science projects have turned to DIY devices assembled from affordable components. At Then Try This, we are looking to develop our own low-cost, portable …

Tablet Woven Maypole-Dancing Robots feature in a new article, as part of our ongoing Penelope project with the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

HackSpace magazine has written a great feature about citizen science projects around the world, and our Sonic Kayak is one of the main case studies.

New water and air pollution sensors added to the Sonic Kayak citizen science system for low cost environmental mapping

The first iteration of the (Algo|Afro)futures programme is complete, enjoy the final performances as they were live streamed from VIVID projects, Birmingham.

At the end of 2019 we were ready to begin work on our second iteration of the Viruscraft project, moving focus from how viruses jump from one species to another, to how they evolve once they are in a population. This project has been focused from the start on designing and building physical interfaces to help understand invisible biological interactions between viruses, host organisms and evolution. Our new plans included …

The Evidence Support Initiative is a pilot project pairing science researchers with councils to facilitate evidence-based decision making, and learn about each other’s worlds, funded by Civic Square’s Dream Fund.

Showcase of participants' attempts at building bower bird architecture.

We're very happy to announce the four artists selected for the (Algo|Afro) Futures programme, who will be approaching live coding from diverse range of practices including spoken word, digital art and electronic music.

We’ve come to the end of the latest series of AccessLab workshops. This post is a debrief on how we’ve progressed and a review of the feedback.

We've repurposed our maypole robots so people can dance together safely (woven robots don't need to social distance).

Evaluation of the viruscraft game - what do people learn from playing it, and does it result in any misunderstandings? Also a summary of questions and answers from our virus Ask-Me-Anything session.

We’ve been awarded seed funding to pilot a new system to encourage and facilitate scientific researchers to work with their local councils, providing on-demand advice on scientific issues to fit the needs of councillors, and perhaps also passing on the skills to find and use scientific information.

A review of the FoAM Kernow studio's activities from 2020.

We are looking to appoint a Non-Executive Director for the FoAM Kernow studio for one year, to build our new advisory team.

After successfully performing maypole dances and creating simple twists and weaves with hundreds of passers by at the Algomech festival in Sheffield, we noticed how much people like to interact with our woven robots - wanting to help or direct their actions by picking them up and trying to understand what they are doing.

As we are interested in tangible programming - where we move code from its conventional …

While processor speeds and the use of computation in our society have increased enormously, it is significant that the materials of electronics construction itself (discrete components soldered on to resin printed circuit boards) has been broadly consistent for well over fifty years.

The Penelope project is concerned with re-evaluating histories of textile technologies with mathematical and scientific thought. The emergence of “wearable electronics”, in particular inspiration from Penelope collaborators and …