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Geezers, turbines, fantasy personas: making the everyday into the future

This double-blind peer reviewed conference paper, awarded best paper ‘for promoting social creativity’ by the conference, is the first account of work conducted by an interdisciplinary team of researchers with community groups of older people to see what might help in ‘Democratising Technology’ for those normally excluded from design conversations about the future. Funded under the Designing for the 21st Century AHRC/EPSRC call, the result is a process for identifying and developing ideas based on values brought by participants using socially-engaged performance and arts methods. The paper follows the early progress of a group of retired men, who, inspired by participation, decide they will act on their ideas and design a water turbine for use in the Thames. Five years since the project that inspired it ended, the resulting turbine is now ready for deployment (http://www.active-energy-london.org). This process of ‘Citizen Innovation’ and the struggle to bring the turbine to production is the subject of a peer-reviewed chapter in the forthcoming collection on DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (MIT Press 2014), while a description of using discourse analysis to pinpoint moments of transformation in the experience of participants was published at the major international human-computer interaction conference ACM SIGCHI (Light, A., 2011, 'Democratising Technology: Inspiring Transformation with Design, Performance and Props', Proc. CHI 2011). Participants from the Democratising Technology study have brought their ideas and experience to several subsequent pieces of work, from the AHRC Connected Communities project Participants United (2010-11), on which Light was co-investigator, to work with schools, art galleries and renewable energy campaigners, for which Light has been advisor. Learning described here has informed 11 Connected Communities projects which Light has led or co-led from 2010-2013 and the methodology has inspired a £1.5M bid to the AHRC on communities and sustainability (to be announced Dec 2013).