Aston Motiv8 was 4 days of workshops taking place in Aston Park in front of the illustrious Aston Hall. It involved working with 2 different sets of young people for 2 days each looking at urban space and mapping responses to their environment, as well as creating interventions in a variety of formats.
Days 1 and 2 Photo Gallery | Day 3 Photo Gallery | Day 4 Photo Gallery
Days 1 and 2 Review
For the first 2 days we did a tour with the young people of the local feral food, collecting and sampling as we wandered around.
After this we brainstormed ideas for what could be included in an alternative tourist guide to aston, using the 7 Wonders and Blunders techniques. Using cheap digital cameras we went with the group to check out personal landmarks and monuments in the area, encountering alleyways, police, derelict buildings, 2 bench parks, taxi rangs and monthly award winning resaurants.
The next day we worked on creating the tourist guide using the flipchart, then used the laptops in the caraven to layout the finished guide using Scribus, a free and open source DTP application running on Linux.
The Guide is designed to be printed double sided on 2 sheets of A4, folded and stapled together to make an 8 page booklet. >Take a look a at PDF of the guide
In the afternoon we created some seedbombs, and also designed some fantastic chalk stencils. After going out around the park with the stencils we went over to the 'jungle bush' and everyone did there bit for urban biodiversity by chucking their seedbombs :-)
>Days 1 + 2 Photo Gallery here
Day 3 + 4 Review
Kaye from the Travellers School Charity was invited to lead workshops with the young people for the last 2 days. She works with groups on the peripheries and introduces them to concepts like autonomous energy and local food issues.
Her bus is powered by a combined wind/PV system running computers, soundsystem, smoothie blenders and laminators.
Her workshops included medicinal and edible wild food walks, computer workshops using camera and the laminator to create identifier cards for plants, demonstrations of how the setup is powered and howto create a soundsytem for 17GBP.
We ran the seedbombs and chalk stencil workshops with the new group and they created some wonderful stencils.