ActiveEnergy: Pittsburgh, Mattress Factory

During the summer of 2012 Loraine Leeson took the concept of Active Energy, as developed through her project with the Geezers in East London, to a residency at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh organised by curator Hilary Robinson as part of her Feminist and… exhibition.

Working with Northside Seniors, she commenced with a question to the group, similar to the one that initiated the Geezers’ project: “If there were any technology that could be developed that you feel would best support yourselves or your communities, what would that be?” Following some discussion the group arrived at an issue that would turn out to be one of the greatest health concerns for the US – a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. This group of older women felt that they would also like more information about the disease to help their awareness of its signs, and for this to be more readily available to younger generations, who might then better support family members stricken with the disease.

Participants United, University of Central Lancashire, Preston

The Geezers were participants in the Connected Communities project ‘Participants United’ which ran for most of 2011, involving Ann Light and led by Paul Egglestone of UCLAN http://www.meldonline.org, to look at constructive styles of community participation in academic research projects. 

After an initial set-up workshop at which the men considered who they would like to meet to continue to develop their ideas (in this case, British Waterways, the authority responsible for canals and rivers at the time), Loraine, Toby and three Geezers (Ray, Ted and John) travelled to Preston for a summit of discussions about participating in research.

What was most notable about the Active Energy contribution was the way that the research had moved out of the hands of the original team based at Queen Mary University of London who brought Loraine and the Geezers together. Although the Geezers had lots to say about being participants in a research project, they were exemplary of a different form of relations, where the men led the work and the team round them ebbed and flowed as needed to make their intended innovations a reality. This was no university project, even though it emerged from one.

Sadly, no one from British Waterways made the trip to join the Geezers in their discussions, despite a long optimistic exchange with the local branch. But the spirit of innovative research models was a good complement to citizen innovation on the tides.

Bow Boys School

The experiences and ideas of older people are rarely voiced in the context of renewable energy technologies, partly because of the stereotyped view that innovation is the remit of younger generations, partly because older people have little access to public space within which to express their desires and share their knowledge. Similarly, young people and teenagers are often excluded from playing an active role in the promotion and development of renewable energies at a local level. 

Although Design and Technology is a compulsory course in secondary education, young people are seldom able to experience the connections between renewable energies and their everyday lives. This was particularly true for pupils at Bow Boys’ School, who live in a densely populated urban environment in one of the poorest boroughs of London. Crucially, bringing this project into their neighbourhood was a form of operating small-scale changes. ActiveEnergy put Bow on the map of renewable energies by demonstrating to the local community, and to London at large, how to set an example and become a model for the rest of the city.

The Not Quite Yet, SPACE, London

In 2007 SPACE Studios commissioned artists Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel, Loraine Leeson and Stacy Makishi to respond to the research project Democratising Technology led by Ann Light, Lois Weaver and others at Queen Mary University of London.

Through this project Loraine met The Geezers at their AgeUK base in Bow and together they embarked on a journey to find a way for renewable energy to support the older population of East London. For The Not Quite Yet exhibition at SPACE Gallery they demonstrated through a large-scale visualisation how tidal turbines could be incorporated into the Thames Barrier. The Geezers themselves made a succinct case for the renewable energy argument and video footage of this was projected in the gallery. The group also presented their ideas at a symposium On the Margins of Technology that accompanied the exhibition. Their contribution to both events aroused considerable interest and it was clear the project could not stop there…

Democratising Technology

Where did it all begin? In 2007, Democratising Technology (DemTech) set out to explore creative aspects of discussing digital technology with groups being marginalised by it. 

We invited five groups of older people to represent those excluded from discussions of future tools and help design some ways of involving them. Led by researchers in performance and computer science at Queen Mary University of London (Pat Healey, Ann Light, Gini Simpson and Lois Weaver), the goal was twofold:

1) to discover a method for inspiring people whose voices are ignored in discussions about technology to consider the values they would like to see embedded in networked tools of the future; and

2) to provide a platform for showcasing those views through the creation of artworks and an exhibition (see fig 1). We used collaborative art practices throughout the 18-month project as a means of achieving these goals. Indeed, the exhibition served to show the results of two kinds of collaboration: it was a means to display pieces created by artists and older people working together, and it allowed us to assess the effectiveness of engagement between artists, researchers and the groups of older people who had come together to work on promoting greater digital inclusion.

One group who participated in DemTech was The Geezers. They followed the general path of helping develop the workshops for use to engage others and were then invited to stay on and work with Loraine Leeson to help her produce a piece representing their experience for the exhibition. This pairing led to the envisioning of GeezerPower: an alternative energy source based on water turbines in London’s Thames.

Fig 1: An overview of DemTech activities

We based the work on a number of premises, including: that digital networks herald significant and hard-to-grasp changes in technology; that new pockets of marginalization will result from this; that older people represent a good cross section of society and yet a statistically marginalized group; that everyone has something to offer the design process; that overcoming exclusion is as much about values as skills; and that art methods provide a means of involving people that science or technology education cannot. When we set off with this aim, we were optimistic that people had opinions to share about future tools and could be supported in sharing them. What we didn’t know was that 5 years later, an idea born in discussions about future technologies and those that had been ‘lost’ during our participants’ lifetimes, linked to their concern about environmental challenges, would be the spur to actually innovate and make new technologies with an environmental theme.