Women who inspire us: a fighter, teacher and explorer

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

As part of International Women’s Day (8 March 2020), we’re taking the opportunity to celebrate some of the great women working on the Temple Quarter programme. In a series of blogs, we’ve asked them to write about the women that inspire them to challenge stereotypes and promote equality.

This first piece is by Gemma Stock, Operations Manager for Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus.

Gemma Stock making an equals sign with her arms
Gemma Stock making the #EachforEqual sign

Edwina Whitwell: a fighter for children’s rights to education, explorer and champion of resilience

The eldest of four girls, Edwina Whitwell (nee Enefer) was born in 1952. Labelled as a daydreamer at school, she married at the age of 18 – as was the expectation of the time – and worked a variety of administrative roles until she left to start a family. Despite the lack of encouragement or support from her (somewhat Victorian) husband, she returned to education in her mid-30s and became a teacher at the age of 42 after completing her GCSEs, A Levels and degree. To support her husband’s salary and to ensure her children wanted for nothing, Edwina worked on weekends and in holidays during her return to education – she also opened her family home to exchange students.

Despite her late arrival to the world of education, Edwina has left an extraordinary mark on children’s lives in the North Somerset area. She worked tirelessly to ensure children with special needs were treated as individuals and received the education they were entitled. She took the time needed to explain a child’s requirements to their parents. She listened to family’s frustrations with the situation and with the “system”. She fought local government for money to ensure a deaf boy went to the right school. She supported parents on applications to make sure their children got into the right educational establishments. She fought to keep kids in school when they would otherwise have been excluded.

Ignoring protests from her husband, Edwina started to travel… alone! She trekked mountains in Romania, walking for part of the time with horrendous food poisoning. In an attempt to avoid further upset, she did a real-life Shirley Valentine. Edwina left a note on the fridge for her husband and flew to Kathmandu to trek the foothills of the Himalayas, where she admitted she thought she’d die when cowering under a piece of Perspex while “hail the size of bricks” fell.

Edwina Whitwell camping in the desert in Oman
Edwina Whitwell camping in the desert in Oman

Since losing her husband who – despite his shortcomings as a forward-thinking husband – was the love of her life, Edwina has travelled extensively. She’s visited America, Oman, Egypt, India, Jordan, Thailand (where she fell off a barge and almost drowned in the River Kwai), Vietnam, Russia, Cambodia, Laos, Morocco, Egypt, Europe and Rwanda where she taught English to children. And in two weeks’ time, she will travel to Antarctica.

Now retired, Edwina’s investment in children’s future is not yet over – she teaches life-skills to year 6 students in the Bristol area on a voluntary basis.

She is the epitome of resilience. Every time she was knocked down or someone said she couldn’t do something, she looked them straight in the eye and did it anyway. She instils this trait in her children, her students and her granddaughters. Edwina is a massive inspiration to women. I know this because she’s my mum and I want to be like her. My friends (who are all in their 40s) and my young nieces all want to be like her – but as hard as we try, I don’t think any of us will ever reach her level of awesomeness!

Read other blogs in this series for International Women’s Day.

Swallowed by a tiny giant

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

by Vanessa Kisuule, Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus artist in residence and Bristol City Poet

What follows is a strange and erratic collection of thoughts to accompany a poem I have written in response to a bot generated poem ‘written’ by Tiny Giant. The bot had the entirety of my last poetry collection A Recipe for Sorcery, a few of my favourite poems from other writers and some tech related writing provided by the University. The result was somewhat like looking at myself with all my body parts in the wrong place, toes on my forehead, elbows and knees swapped round. It was confusing, slightly sinister and endlessly fascinating.

The echoes of my work were immediately clear. They were not distorted enough to be unrecognisable, but there was enough deviation to intrigue and unsettle me. Some of the imagery jarred. Some of it occasionally touched on the profound. It was impossible not to wince at my own stylistic tropes: imagine having a friend write a parody of your work and reading it back to you, but with none of the tact that a human might offer! I’d recommend this process to any poet, but it would be remiss for me not to acknowledge the existential crisis it may cause.

Poetry is an artistic hinterland where abstraction and ambiguity can live more comfortably than in other forms. Linear narrative and logical coherence do not matter in this context as they would for a novel or a screen play. Poetry, then, may be the medium that AI could find the most ‘success’. Moments of incidental brilliance in the poem were not frequent, but there were enough to make me sit up. Some images genuinely moved and excited me; there was even the occasional jolt of envy at a particularly evocative turn of phrase.

It was hard to know what to do with these mixed feelings of admiration and disquietude. It’s rather foolish, and pointless, to be envious of an algorithm. It has simply done what was asked of it, deducing an end goal through its encrypted set of logical rules. Surely art is as much about intention and communication as the end product? Unlike you or I, it is unmotivated by a desire to connect with others or even a compulsion to sound clever, original or superior. And yet….

It’s a small comfort that it cannot produce anything without the initial input of words, but could the same not be said for us? Aren’t all the years of education, reading, talking and listening we do not our own form of data collection? The methodical approach of the bot may seem antithetical to the elusive creative process we purport to undertake, but this project has forced me to reconsider how we talk about the mechanics of art.

A huge amount of art has been produced through formulas for centuries, culminating in what we may loosely call ‘popular culture’. There are the four chord progressions and seven story formats that recur again and again in music, literature, film and theatre.  More often than not, we pull from a series of long-established methods which we may copy or use as a spring board to ‘new’ ideas. Though we’re loathe to admit it, we, too, are algorithmic machines. AI may be the impetus we need to push ourselves out of our own tropes, or at least be more aware of how much we rely on them.

Marcus Du Sautoy’s timely new book The Creativity Code details how the new innovations in algorithmic learning are expanding our notions of whether a computer can ‘think creatively’. He talks about ‘bottom up’ code: algorithms that learn through data input and continually adjusting its methods for better results. In this way, the AI bot Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov having played millions of iterations of the game, learned from its mistakes and developed creative strategies to ensure a higher chance of winning. The bot can even make choices that have not been explicitly programmed by the writers of the code. It’s hard to overstate what a game changer this is: the potential for AI to innovate rather than regurgitate is ever more plausible.

The neural network used to create my poem also exhumes ghosts. In PLaiTH, Tiny Giant worked with other agencies to not only produce work in Sylvia Plath’s style but in her handwriting. This detail pushes at new level of invasive imitation, an unwitting mockery of penmanship and its implied intimacy. The project demonstrates how easily this can be learnt, aped and mass produced. Plath’s death is mired in controversy and the seductive myth of a genius’ life cut short. It’s natural to wonder what she may have produced had she lived longer. The Plath Project could be framed as a respectful homage, a creative continuation of legacy forming an ellipsis where once there was a full stop. Still, there is a difficult conversation to be had around assumption and ownership, on how we justify the use of intellectual copyright after death.

There is an online quiz called Bot or Not with fifteen poems in it which asks you to guess which were written by humans and which by bots. I got eight out of fifteen. It’s safe to say that the ‘humanity’ we assume is inherent in human writing is not at all obvious. Many people feel cheated when they learn that a piece of art that moved them was not made by a fellow human. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to admonish ourselves, or demonise the AI. Our minds are built to create meaning and relevance in everything we consume. It’s why we anthropomorphise animals, why we tell stories and build religion. In a world where bot generated art is an ever increasing part of our reality, would it not be a natural extension of our survival instinct to engage with it? Ultimately, if the end result stirs you, does it matter who or what made it? I still don’t know if it does, but I’m sure our morality and imagination will expand to fit around this brave new world.

Can AI write poetry?

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

For National Storytelling Week, we investigated the boundary between human and technology in the creative arts. We worked with Tiny Giant to train a recurrent neural network on Bristol City Poet Vanessa Kisuule’s poetry and a selection of technology-related pieces. The lines below are an extract of what the neural network produced and the poem below that is Vanessa’s reaction to the process. Read more about Vanessa’s response to the experience.

a goddess of the space bar
my brain, stretching
a recipe for answers.
cut and filed
to fit to technology

her isles of know
through the dirt on her own rivers
digital darkness
jeopardising my own name

then that alexa
she remembers gush and implosion
not a boy
gotta love us , girls
I’ve said to stop

we are blinded by the first of things
go beyond the height
it is easy !
give us dynamite drills
i cut the country

like they think
this or phone?
hand me love anxious
I’ll wait
and when we fight , not a ring

except in the world wide web
we just print and weave heat
write rules out
give them stumps for hands

my brain stretching
i watch my end
fleeting footnote on a final page
you are not enough to be written

living in virtual reality
angel dilated beautiful on the plazas
you niggling
coded numbers flashing light
that’s gold

like something boneless, seeping seeping
eyes wearied so so as deep
please no tweets
affecting our content
trigger my thumb, i dare not!

it is our right to a back up
i don’t hear it
once everybody had the place
all the stories we have ever been
just a spark you you?
we are the thing to your real

my private face
youtube my heart
every single tongue, like the hope one
make a picture of steel

 

A Tiny Giant Looms

by Vanessa Kisuule

 

I hereby acknowledge the long legacy of algorithms in the scattered art of poetry.

Long before upstart bots birthed Frankenstein verse,

Shakespeare took mangled beasts of sentiment and squeezed them into the boning of sonnets,

laced them in until every implication stood taut and ready for inspection.

*

You know what’s interesting? I’m growing in a way I couldn’t if I had a physical form. 

I mean, I’m not limited.

I’m not tethered to time and space in a way that I would be if I was stuck in a body 

that’s inevitably gonna die.

From the 2013 film Her

*

I hereby acknowledge we are not sacred.

Adorned as we are by glittering myths, they sadly cannot endure.

Our ghosts of inspiration are soft willed, quick to wilt.

The rigour of language made machine gave poetry its rib and muscle.

In rhyme, in meter, in ancient ghazal we find formulaic dogma.

Our slow work this tiny giant does in minutes,

unsaddled by anxiety, coffee shakes or misplaced hopes of profundity.

It’s simply a task unpacked, sifted then neutered like a dog.

*

Once you learn to think, (in) 

Algorithms, 

the (programming) language is secondary. 

(Sure) it kicks and drags its feet (a little). 

(But) in the end(…)

From a 2017 Medium article entitled When you finish reading this, you’ll know how to code

*

I hereby acknowledge the false god of originality.

How we’ve romanticised this thirst for theft,

past thoughts reheated then declared fresh.

Words cluster like boiled sweets in my mouth and

Tiny giant surveys them.

A singular, stoic criteria.

No pretence, reverence or preference encoded.

A thick plagiarist porridge, served cool.

Spirals of thought revealed as affectation,

heavy with the effort to please or reveal.

I am humbled and furious.

We were drunk on us-ness, our inimitable humanhood.

Look at how we hold a thought up to the light,

scallop its edges until it dances in the wind.

*

Computers expect you to declare your variables. 

A variable declaration is like 

a birth certificate for a piece of data.

From aforementioned Medium article

*

I hereby acknowledge a shift in the hierarchy.

Whoever won a fight with the tide?

Whoever punched a wall of code and still kept their knuckles, their pride or slovenly mind?

They have not come for our jobs, they have come for our salt flaked egos,

our rotted fallacy of divine purpose.

Tiny Giant ‘speaks’ of things beyond our young puddle of reality.

In this new frontier we will not lead, but chase the future off the cliff face of our own limits.

Will you be there, your heavy foot quivering as if a glitch in the matrix?

Your last words before the sweep of oblivion

already predicted?

 

Read more about Vanessa’s experience of seeing her own work interpreted by artificial intelligence in her commentary ‘Swallowed by a tiny giant’.

Is digital technology undermining our democracy?

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

By Professor Stephan Lewandowsky

Democracy is debate. But unfortunately access to the “free marketplace of ideas” where citizens see all sides of the debate isn’t equal.

The internet was going to fix that.

Instead, we now live in an era of democratic backsliding, with at least 80 countries having become less democratic during the last decade. And much of that decline is being blamed on the internet, which facilitates the spread of disinformation, hate speech, incitement, and foreign interference in elections.

This is exactly why universities around the world, including the University of Bristol’s Digital Futures Institute, are working with tech giants, governments and the third sector to examine how this happened and what we can do about it.

Targeting the problem

Much criticism has been directed at the social media giants, in particular Facebook – it was recently labelled “digital gangsters” by a UK Parliamentary committee.

There’s a basic incompatibility between democracy and Facebook’s business model of “microtargeting”. We know from psychological research that 300 “Likes” are sufficient to infer someone’s personality with greater accuracy than their spouse.

Facebook patented this idea and enabled advertisers – including politicians – to segment their audience and target their messages more effectively. However much of the highly personal information used for microtargeting is inferred by Facebook rather than explicitly given by users.

If you use Facebook, it’s already building a profile of who you are – if you want to know what Facebook knows about you, download your data. Prepare to be amazed.

When politicians know their messages are confined to a partisan audience, there’s no pressure for moderation and extremism becomes politically rewarding. It’s also a recipe for disinformation. Politicians can get away with sending false information to a carefully selected group of potential sympathisers who are unlikely to object, even if they detect they’re being misled.

What are the solutions?

Rising social concern about the use of digital data and AI technologies in the political process is prompting big tech companies to do something about this. Google announced it’ll no longer permit microtargeting of political messages – applicable in the forthcoming British election and rolled out globally in 2020.

Although political campaigns reacted with outrage against the move, it’s a step in the right direction. It forces campaigns to be more palatable to a broader audience – making extremism less rewarding and opening the door to rebuttals. Facebook has also taken several steps to help safeguard the 2020 US election, including the clear labelling of misinformation and additional transparency measures. Thus far, Facebook has not addressed the problems arising from microtargeting.

Self-regulation within the online ad-serving industry is important, but isn’t enough to address the challenges. Research is being done in universities around the world to understand these practices, to examine their effects on citizens – and their voting behaviour – and to develop technologies that track and block the trackers or seek to expose systematic biases in ads.

The University of Bristol’s Digital Futures Institute recently received £100m of funding from Research England and 27 organisations keen to collaborate in shaping digital futures, including BT, BBC, Watershed, Knowle West Media Centre and Black South West Network.

Bristol Digital Futures Institute, which will be based at the planned Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, will work with partners to challenge the traditional, linear model of technical innovation. When technologies are developed without in-depth consideration of social questions, they abdicate responsibility for the future worlds they may be creating. By bringing social scientists and engineers together, the new Institute aims to pioneer a new way of creating digital technologies, with future societies at its heart.

Digital technologies are transforming our world. Instead of wondering what on earth will come next, Bristol Digital Futures Institute will work to democratise the future, driving inclusive and innovative technologies that benefit all of us.

Sharing experiences across borders

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

Professor Guy Orpen, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for New Campus Development

An aerial view of Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

The past six weeks or so have seen the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus on tour, featuring in debates in Bristol, Brussels and the Netherlands – and visiting comparable university sites in London.

Placemaking was the theme of a session at a recent Built Environment Networking conference in the Passenger Shed at Temple Meads. Given how underused the site and the streets around the new campus are currently, it’s clear we’ll need to make a big effort to create a sense of place and belonging for all who use and visit it. This implies a major emphasis on the way the public spaces on the campus are designed and used so everyone can enjoy them and feel welcome.

This issue was discussed in the session on “The Bristol Transformation: Creating Great Places” at the Watershed during the recent Festival of the Future City. The role of public art and cultural activity in and around the campus was highlighted by Mike Keys, the campus lead architect, and Fabienne Nicholas of Contemporary Art Society, leading on public art strategy for the campus and University more widely. Elsewhere in the Festival, Tom Sperlinger, Joanna Holmes and John Goddard, the guru of civic universities, led a discussion on the role universities should play in their places. It was striking how impressed John was with the pace and quality of progress in Bristol.

Meanwhile on the continent, the University took some of its leading lights in research to Brussels to meet members of the Commission, European funders and research organisation leaders, as well as the UK’s representatives there. Our message was simple: there may be confusion over national EU policy, but Bristol is open for partnership and investment and is making progress in Temple Quarter and elsewhere. It’s clear we need to crack on and make that progress for the benefit of all.

I took a similar message to Dutch colleagues grappling with the role that universities can play in their cities at a conference in Den Bosch – ironically it was held on the day after Brexit was supposed happen. They were keen to hear about how our University had declared a Climate Emergency, was working with our city on the One City Plan and is building partnerships to create value for all. Their invitation followed a major delegation visit to Bristol in February – they clearly feel something interesting and important is happening here.

Since then, we have been to see our university peers’ major developments in London – Imperial College’s White City Campus, UAL’s Central Saint Martin’s college and UCL’s at Here East and the Olympic Park. While these are impressive, we sensed we had something both distinctive and highly competitive to offer in Temple Quarter. Combining real local community participation in research, innovation and education, the world-leading capabilities the University brings and the powerful commitment of government and industry is special and potent – and is great to see happening in Bristol.

Why students need an innovative mindset

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

By Professor Kirsten Cater, Academic Director Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Students at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

With 5.7 million small business in the UK and more than 1,000 new start-ups every single day, it’s critical that our students are prepared for this competitive environment. And this doesn’t mean starting the conversation when they graduate – students should be in this frame of mind from day one and build the skills needed for the ever-changing workplace.

Many employers argue that graduates’ skills don’t always match the ones they’re looking for, and this gap can be an intimidating barrier for those leaving university. Education should be a pathway that naturally leads students into the workplace. Aligning courses with longer-term skills, including having an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset, is critical to the success of our graduates and the organisations they work for or the enterprises they create.

Mindset + knowledge = innovation

Our multi-award-winning Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s mission is to graduate the next generation with the adaptability, agility, interdisciplinary and innovative thinking to reflect the changing world of employment and modern society. They’ll be equipped to tackle complex problems by collaborating across traditional boundaries and disciplines. Our first-of-their-kind degrees bring students together from 14 different disciplines (including computer science, anthropology, history, geography and theatre) to study innovation and entrepreneurship alongside their subject specialism.

At the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship we also do things differently, we need to be innovative and entrepreneurial ourselves – living and breathing what we teach. We’re not teaching “traditional” subjects, so we can’t teach in a “traditional” way – we deliver innovative pedagogical approaches. We hold sessions in a studio-based learning environment and give our students real-world inter-disciplinary challenges. Our centre encourages students to be creative, be innovative, take risks, work in teams and share ideas openly with each other – learning how to take those ideas forward together into start-up enterprises.

“I was intrigued and excited by the University of Bristol’s own innovative thinking in establishing these degree courses. Having spent a day immersed with the staff and students, and after giving a lecture and workshop, I’m hugely impressed by the potential to inspire and encourage world change makers to think new thoughts; to fail, learn and iterate and to develop the people with the creativity and resilience our 21st century society and economy cries out for. It shows Bristol continues to lead in the relevance, variety and application of its courses and support.” Paul Lindley, founder of Ella’s Kitchen

Collaboration is key and we don’t just empower students to work with their peers. The centre is host to many of our external partners and a network of investors ready to support ideas – and these relationships are at the heart of what we do.

Successful innovation doesn’t stop here

World number one university business incubator SETsquared and enterprise hub Engine Shed are already driving new ways of thinking in business and inclusive growth across the region. And University of Bristol spin-out Ziylo was recently bought by a global healthcare company in a deal worth around $800million. Our students can see this success firsthand and learn from others’ experiences.

Vassilis Seferedis, CEO and Founder of Zetta Networks says, “My advice to an entrepreneur, especially a technology entrepreneur, is to focus on understanding and communicating the business problem that you’re solving. There can be a temptation, particularly for academics, to be distracted by interesting technology rather than the application of technology to solve problems. If you can understand the business problem you are solving, can explain that to the end-user and quantify the value of what you do, you will stand out from your peers.”

This culture of collaboration and innovation will form the core of our new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, which will be home to the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. At the new campus, enterprise and community partners will come together under the same roof as our students and researchers to work to build a better future.

“It’s imperative that young people are given access to the skills and experiences to help raise awareness of future opportunities and to engage them with the workplace at a young age. In collaboration with Engine Shed’s Diverse Workforce for the Future project, SETsquared Bristol has provided educational sessions with the most innovative tech start-ups that are growing their businesses at SETsquared. We look forward to being involved with new opportunities that the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus will provide, linking enterprise, learning and community in Bristol.” Monika Radclyffe, Centre Director of SETsquared Bristol

Professor Kirsten Cater is speaking at Bristol Technology Showcase on Friday 8 November about Technology, People and Change – Building the workforce for the Future.

Use or be used: Skills, technology and the future of work

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

By Dr Frederick Harry Pitts, Lecturer in Management at University of Bristol

When people imagine the future of work, their minds often jump to AI replacing jobs and machines taking over the world – leaving humans in an age of widespread unemployment. But in reality, automation is more likely to replace individual tasks within jobs than the jobs themselves.

Indeed, we already coexist with machine learning in the workplace using everyday processes like predictive text. This shows the future of work lies more in the augmentation of human labour with technology than its replacement by it.

This augmentation could alienate workers, rendering them what Marx called the mere ‘appendages of machines’. But it could also liberate and empower them to apply their skills and knowledge to the active control and mastery of technology.

Far from something that arises naturally and automatically, technology is a human creation subject to the social and political conditions in which it’s developed. But, without workers’ freedom to wield power over the tools and devices they use in their work, these conditions often mean new technologies can take on a life of their own.

Whilst policymakers and commentators get caught up in grand schemes to adapt to robotised worklessness or fully automated luxury, a more urgent imperative goes overlooked. This is the need to regulate and organise the world of work as it stands now, in order to bend technology to our will rather than the reverse.

Empower, not dominate

This centres on skill. We might think of skill as the capacity to control and shape the world around us. Whilst it’s popular to speak of skill as ‘talent’, this isn’t true – as the term might suggest, it’s not something innate, but something learned.

Economic, social, political and cultural contextual factors can impact the learning conditions necessary to attain skill. And just as technology adoption and implementation is influenced by these factors, so too is investment in the skills to use it.

Several factors impact employers’ and governments’ decisions to invest in the skills needed to thrive in a technological world of work. From wages and contractual conditions to wider political-economic, regulatory and legal structures, these environments often add to the challenge.

Where precarious, low-pay work arrangements are the norm, as they are in the UK today, there’s little incentive for employers to invest in the technology to make that work better and more productive. Specifically, developing the skills necessary for workers to experience technology as an empowering rather than dominating force.

Whether a warehouse, an office or an Uber, new technology being imposed to manage workers in a workplace often goes hand in hand with a ‘wild west’ regulatory regime. And this is unlikely to have any sense of longevity or commitment on the part of employers or employees.

This culture leaves little basis around which workers and employers can share in the gains of greater productivity – whether that’s through skills, training, better pay or terms and conditions.

Somewhere in the augmentation of human labour by technology, there’s a real opportunity for a new mission of skilful mastery that turns technology to human purposes. This can’t be achieved through the supply of skills in education alone. There are wider political-economic constraints on the capacity to innovate and develop that need addressing at other levels.

What’s the solution?

Increases in minimum wages may help. This would force employers to seek more from workers at the bottom end of the labour market and invest in productivity-raising technologies and the skills to use them. But this could have unintended consequences. Although employers might gain in profits, workers won’t necessarily have an equal gain in skills – or a fair share in the benefits of greater productivity.

Rather than tweaks to pay alone, the best solutions rest in the legal and regulatory environment of work. Increase in trade union membership and collective bargaining would help grant workers the voice to protect themselves against rapid change. This could also drive wages upwards and incentivise investment by employers at the same time.

By forcing employers’ hands to the fire with increases in wages and bargaining power, this could help replicate some of the gains of the twentieth-century industrial compromise. This was when managers and workers had a shared interest in increasing levels of productivity in workplaces.

At the time, the interest was much more likely to be based on skilled, secure and fulfilling work where humans used technology to their ends. It is, however, the reverse that’s the reality of work for too many today.

It’s too often the case that the human power to shape the world around us slips by the wayside in discussions of technology. The latter is commonly presented as developing autonomously, with skills shifting passively in response.

We are constrained by conditions that are ever-changing – and not always of our choosing. But skill is the measure of our ability to bend technology and the wider world to our purposes and determine the direction it takes. It is up to us to use it – or be used ourselves.

Dr Harry Pitts is speaking at RSA Bristol: Future of Work on Thursday 7 November. The text is based on a talk given at Millennifest Bristol. Millennifest’s organisers, the thinktank Common Vision, will also be publishing a version of this blog.

Low carbon, high inclusion: Economies of the future

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

By Professor Martin Parker

Confronted by today’s problems, it’s easy to imagine there’s nothing we can do to help. Climate change, gigantic global and local inequalities, the rise of a politics that positions the ‘people’ against the ‘elite’. It’s all too much to deal with, and not surprising that many people turn away in despair. Standing in front of a tsunami, what is the point of gluing yourself to some railings? We can see the problems, but they’re too big to deal with in our everyday lives.

Yet the amazing thing about this city and region is just how many people are already organising new ways to think about the problems that face us. These are people already trying to build a low carbon and high inclusion economy. In just about every area you might think of – whether its food, transport, energy, media or housing – new businesses are growing which are turning standard economic assumptions on their head.

The economy is the answer

For the last fifty years we’ve been collectively persuaded that all businesses need to have leaders who are motivated by huge salaries. Or that efficiency just means saving money by making people work harder for less money, and that shareholders deserve super-normal returns on their investments. Or even that it’s OK if a business arranges its affairs so that it doesn’t pay tax, or it creates waste and social problems and then lets the rest of us clear it up.

But all these assumptions are wrong. Climate change is caused when businesses emit carbon to make products or sell things that require us to emit carbon to use them. Inequalities are caused by concentrations of wealth within and between nations which in turn have been caused by past and present businesses.

Our political tribalism reflects the problems of de-industrialising parts of the UK in places where local well-paying industries are long gone, and replaced by McJobs, precarious employment and Amazon warehouses. Whichever way you run the argument, if we want to face the tsunami, we need to have a different way of doing business – a new economy.

That’s why we have started the Inclusive Economy Initiative at the University of Bristol. It involves a team of social scientists from various disciplines who are interested in working with local alternative businesses to grow the new economy we all need. We’re already talking to co-ops, green companies and organisations like Bristol 24/7’s Better Business network.

What can we do?

There are three things we need to do to make a new future. One is to decarbonise all aspects of business practice, from cars to burgers, and do it as rapidly as possible. The second is to make sure these changes produce economies which are inclusive – they should reward everyone who lives in Bristol, not just those from the leafy north and west.

Finally, we think it’s really important that all workers have more control over their workplaces, and ideally they should have meaningful ownership too. A practical experience of democracy at work will help us restore a sense of democracy in our city and country.

This would produce an economy which doesn’t damage the planet, doesn’t discriminate against people on the basis of gender or skin colour, and which gives workers a sense of shaping the places that they work. These might seem like utopian ideas, but unless we make them real, we will all end up the poorer.

Contact the University of Bristol’s Inclusive Economy Initiative on bris-iei@bristol.ac.uk.

Martin_Parker
Professor Martin Parker

More than a building

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

By Professor Guy Orpen, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for New Campus Development

In May I wrote about the experience of seeing the sun rise from Platform 15 at Temple Meads for the first time since the 1920s, following the demolition of the former Royal Mail Sorting Office. This week the University of Bristol has published new plans for that site.

Importantly, alongside two major buildings, these include major public spaces leading to a new Eastern entrance to Temple Meads planned by Network Rail. That entrance will be under the selfsame Platform 15, on the level of both the site and the thoroughfare running under the platforms.

The planned site has plentiful seating and is greened by trees sheltering those walking and cycling across it. The harbourside frontage is envisaged as having many more trees to create a green corridor linking the existing Totterdown basin waterside and neighbouring spaces. The sustainability ambitions of the University are manifested in a building that provides its own energy and links to the city’s district heat network – all while harvesting rainwater and solar energy across its roof.

The designs portray what a day in the life of the new campus at Temple Quarter might look like – from the dawn light through the glazed panels of the interior gardens to the twilight images of the public space passing under and through the main building. This reminds us that this is a part of the city that could and should be lively and used out of hours.

While the consultation is about the physical redevelopment of a site that has lain derelict for a generation, the bigger story is how the city, its enterprises and communities and the University can work together there to develop their futures for the better.

As I write this column, I am attending a conference debating the value of universities to the cities, regions and society they are in. It is a debate that reveals a range of great work going on in cities around the world. There is strong recognition in the room of the merit of engaging with the people and organisations in a place and to do so with respect, to create mutual and sustained benefit. Some at the conference referred to the value created by student and staff volunteering, others to the opportunities created by positive recruitment, living wage and responsible procurement policies – all things we do here in Bristol. In discussions, we sought to define how universities could learn from and discover with their civic partners and be fair, respectful and relevant in so doing. The new campus building offers venues such as the Story Exchange and the Bristol Rooms just for these cooperative activities.

In this consultation with our city, we want to hear what you think of our development plans. We will want to sustain the dialogue over the years to come, because we will not only develop the site, but be there to live, work, play and learn with and for our city over the decades to come.

You can see our plans, share your view and find more details about our consultation events here.

We Are Not a Single Species: Behind the scenes

Posted on by Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus

Paul Hurley, one of our artists in residence, has created a collaborative film investigating the heritage of Temple Quarter and the human and nonhuman communities that inhabit the area. The piece will be on display 20-21 September at SPACE, 6 West Street, Old Market. 

There are many things that connect us in Bristol – different worlds, experiences, identities and perceptions bridge the gaps between us. Paul’s creation is designed to unpack this and introduce us to a new way of seeing our world. 

“We live in entanglements of human and nonhuman worlds, of pasts, presents, and many possible futures. My approach to the residency was to explore some of these, to tease out some of the tangled threads that connect different worlds to a new university campus in the city.” – Paul Hurley

Cinemadography: Barney LaBeija filming on a GoPro

While filming, Paul spent some time around the University and at the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus building site. To capture the nonhuman perspective in these areas, his four-legged companion Barney donned a GoPro and set off exploring. Often led by Barney’s nose, Paul captured footage he might never have chosen himself. He said, “There were elements of a situationist dérive, an artistic drift around the city, unsure where we and the camera were being taken.” 

As part of the piece, others were invited to collaborate in ‘walk and talks’ with a nonhuman of their choice – human participants included university staff, members of the public and people living and working near Temple Quarter. Recording the conversations, they walked with a range of nonhumans from the weather and Carlo the cat to Siri and the plants of the University’s botanic garden. 

Paul explained that “by combining the dog-filmed footage with a collage of audio from the walks, our expectations of looking at the city were disrupted.” In the exhibition on 20-21 September, each visitor will experience a unique combination of sound and visual – reflecting the serendipity of the filming itself. An audio track of the ‘walk and talk’ conversations together with three screens showing individual videos are all different lengths, creating intersecting spirals of film instead of a loop. 

“They operate like the layers of conversation, history and experience that accumulate in articulating the world (or worlds) of the Temple Quarter. These worlds, like us, are multiple, they are separate but entangled. We are not – and can never be – a single species.” – Paul Hurley 

 

‘We are not a single species’, by Paul Hurley. Film by Paul Hurley and Paul Samuel White, cinemadography by Barney LaBeija, copyright Paul Hurley 2019.  

With thanks to all human and nonhuman participants.