In September we had a marvellous time with the young inventors from Brighton’s brilliant MakerClub designing solutions to food waste and social isolation.

Harvest Hack with MakerClub at ONCA Gallery from Andrew Pledger on Vimeo.

Transcript

Persephone, ONCA Gallery: The Harvest Hack Project was an idea that we came up with in partnership with our good friends the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership and the Maker Club. What we really wanted to do was to think about food and sharing.

Mia, Maker Club: We’re getting the children to think about what it feels like to not have food or to not have people around you when you’re enjoying food and to how they can fix that using technology. We thought it would be a really exciting opportunity for the children to display their work in a gallery and share it with the community around them. So it was a really exciting collaboration.

Carrina, ONCA Gallery: It’s been a personal passion of mine to work more with digital artists and also digital makers. And Maker Club for me represents all of those things.

Persephone: Maker Club is about nurturing new thinkers, and new genius, and new ways of looking at the world. And we were interested in working with a partner that was more digital and more technologically focused than ONCA usually has been. So it’s been a really fruitful collaboration.

Carrina: This was bringing together the brightest finds and that wonderful ingenuity and creativity that you have when you’re little and getting them to look at how they would they would solve that problem. And how, most importantly, digital technology can help.

Child 1: I really like the things that seem impossible, and you can make them more possible and you can build really cool things.

Child 2: My favourite thing is how we got to use the cool machines and be creative and just create what we want.

Carrina: The standard was outstanding. Everything from their ideas, their ability to grasp what is quite a complicated issue, to be able to take their ideas and take it from a little seed of an idea and put it into a presentational form and then to make stuff in the lab. It was just wonderful. Big thumbs up and thanks to Technology (2:22) and a big thumbs up to BossAlien who donated some t-shirts and prizes.

About the project

Supported by a Brighton Digital Festival 2016 Grassroots Fund award, ONCA, Brighton & Hove Food Partnership and MakerClub brought makers, developers and young people together with people using these services to explore solutions to these questions at a Harvest Hack. With the help of volunteer mentors, MakerClub Brighton’s after-school club participants explored a range of socially-beneficial possibilities through a combination of creativity, innovative problem solving and technology. They delved into food sharing-inspired questions, worked in small teams to explore the aspects of the issue that interested them, then moved from brainstorming into rough prototyping. During BDF, each participant/ team presented their project to a BDF panel and received prizes donated by Technology Will Save Us and Boss Alien.

With thanks to our partners Brighton & Hove Food Partnership and Brighton Digital Festival, and to all the lovely people and organisations who shared their time and resources to make this such a special event. Enjoy the movie!