From the 17th until the 20th of September 2015 the Dortmunder U is hosting the self-maker-based festival Innovative Citizen.
This fair focuses on the maker-culture which is connected to digital technologies.
After the opening on Thursday morning with a symposium about the new urban production and its sustainability, there will be several speeches, debates, discussions and workshops. It is all about raising awareness of being more sensible and responsible towards our environment and surroundings and showing people how to get involved.
The visitors and participants can repair, make and work in fablabs, repair-cafés, open garages and urban-farming-initiatives. There will be a complete new inventing of living, producing and moving in the urban field of cities.
Many captivating projects will be presented during the festival, amongst them two winning projects of the 2015 Prototyping Lab In/Visible Cities. The Prototyping Lab was initiated by Public Art Lab in collaboration with Fraunhofer FOKUS and funded by the RWE Foundation. Creative developers, IT experts, urban planners and future visionaries have been invited to create DIY and crowdsourcing strategies dealing with the visualization of invisible technologies and data collection of our cities. The three topics safety (digital citizen), climate change and energy (hybrid city) and translocality formed the participants’ starting point for creating use cases of light scenarios generated through open data, crowdsourcing sensor networks and DIY interfaces.
These two projects are (We are) Light Catchers by Michael Ang and Save-O-Meter by Ricardo O’Nascimento, Melanie Nobis and Achim Friedland. ’(We are) Light Catchers’ collects personal light experiences by using sensors. The data is saved in a collaborative public light sculpture which raises awareness of our individual light environment. ’Save-O-Meter’ is a workshop that aims to develop an interactive light installation to visualize the consumption of water and energy in a city. Both projects are also shown in Jena during the CITY VISIONS JENA festival from October 8 to 11, 2015.
For more information: http://innovative-citizen.de/festival2015/
Image: © Hannes Woidich