Open Citizens is a programme of activity by Ludic Rooms exploring how a playful approach to creative technologies in public space might drive new conversations around citizenship in the 21st century.

We take the approach that everyone can inform and develop creative ideas using technology, if given the right tools and the invitation. We have developed a speculative design process, with our own specially created playing cards to provide context and stimulate ideas. We make and remake ideas, using familiar materials and work with participants to refine concepts to the point that they can be produced as a working prototype. 

Throughout 2017, we delivered our largest Open Citizens programme to date, engaging a community of creators, making work that sparks the imagination of local people.  We were delighted to be awarded the West Midlands Tech Award for ‘Innovation in Arts and Culture’ for this project!

How can challenges of the urban environment be made visible to its inhabitants? How can we ‘nudge’ behaviour and use data to solve problems? In this collaborative project, we invited 30 Year 11 secondary school students and 20 undergraduate students to consider this whilst playing with, identifying, and solving problems within their own communities.

This multipartner project aimed to explore how STEM subjects can contribute to young people becoming more active future custodians of their city and to examine how access to open manufacturing techniques and open public data might inspire social change.

By looking in detail at an aspect of urban life, we hoped to encourage young people to not only think critically about the social infrastructure that surrounds them but more importantly, how they can be empowered to facilitate change.

Supported by Think Higher and FabLab Coventry.

Random String is a major development programme based in Coventry which gives a diverse range of opportunities to experience and learn about creative technology. Random String began in 2014 and has grown into a biennial project, running in 2014, 2016, and 2018.

Commissioned by Bristol Green Capital 2015 as part of their Neighbourhood Arts Programme, inviting people to see “junk” in a fresh way by tapping into the shared experiences of play across different generations and cultures. It creates new invitations, pretexts, tools and spaces for social interaction, by starting with the very personal & then connecting up with neighbours and neighbourhoods. The project will work with lead local residents on a journey of social archaeology to rediscover and repurpose the playable gems hidden among the dusty piles of forgotten “junk” lurking in people’s attics, garages and sheds, shining a light on the latent social and cultural potential of these objects through the lens of collaborative play. These playable artefacts- from rusty bike wheels & old sledges to bent hoola-hoops, dusty console controllers and forgotten Furbies will be reborn through story-telling and active play.

“How might your daily commute differ if you travelled as slowly as possible? What might you see, touch or smell if you missed your turn and had to go a different way? Disobey a sign, give streets new and better names. Look for the bigger pattern in the city, notice the smaller details as you do.”

 As part of the AHRC Connected Communities Conference, we devised a series of technology augmented walking workshops exploring new methodologies for documenting, provoking and sharing local knowledge. Using psychogeographical provocations and ‘stop and stare’ techniques, we used GPS to get us lost.

Workshops participants were able to play with consumer handheld devices as well as prototype, customised and hacked hardware to record the information that surrounds everyday journeys. Following the walking workshops, we worked together to investigate novel forms of data recording, analysis and visualisation.

Inspired by the Sheldon Tapestry which has recently been returned to Warwickshire after its showcase at the British Museum, Process.Thread is an innovative community e-textiles project exploring the ways that digital technologies are affecting contemporary rural life in Warwickshire. Groups from rural communities across the county are working collaboratively with Ludic Rooms and textile artist Julia O’Connell.

Create…Consume…Share…Play.

Around the Phoenix we placed a series of QR codes, on panels, stickers, flyers and brochures. We invited audience to find a code, scan and play. We presented a trio of gesture and movement controlled interactive experiences that explored the Phoenix’s valuable role in the local cultural community.

PlayBack was the result of a weeklong residency at the Phoenix Digital Arts Centre in Leicester. It resulted in us creating a series of playful interactive artworks created for the video wall in the Phoenix’s café bar.