Planting

Manchester is a large city but does not have many spaces that are green or having plants/flowers. Through our festival we want to change this with people participating and working together. We have made these plant pots out of old bottles, recycling every day objects into something beautiful. These can then be filled with plants and hung around Manchester. They brighten up any place that they are hung. Whilst we were hanging these we had very positive feedback of the public, even had people wanting to join in. This has shown us that simple projects like this will work well, as participation is key around the city we rely on people wanting to join in.

Musical Swings

Colossal

Daily Tous Les Jours have created these musical swings in Montreal, they have 21 installations set up around the city. When a person swings it creates sound, engaging sight and sound together. This is a great way of making people interact with a design piece, its inclusive to all and simple to do. This design group would be a good match for our design festival, they create work that fits perfectly within our manifesto and what we want to achieve. 

Boats

The easy guide to building a boat has been tried and tested with great success. These are images of the final idea, taking the day time activity into the night time. The boats can be made in pop up design spaces around the festival, these can then be sailed down the river to create floating installations. The paper is biodegradable, so will not harm the canal or anything living in it.  

Yee Peng Festival

The festival is interactive, we want it to be inclusive of everyone and participation is encouraged in a range of events. After looking at videos from the Yee Peng Festival in Chiang Mai, I want to create events that cross over into the night time, into the darkness of the city and light it up. My event would start in the day, with people at the festival creating paper lanterns, creating a hub of activity on a roof top. From this it will create a mass of lanterns ready for the evening. Once the city has become dark, people will come back together and light their lanterns, creating a sea of light into the sky.

Canal Bombs

Along the canal we are going to have workshops set up by designers to create canal bombs to be thrown into the water. We want to help clean up the canal as it is very forgotten and dirty. These bombs look good, fizz up to create interesting patterns in the water and also are filled with goodness for the water. They will create an interesting piece to observe, and also will have a lasting positive in the water. These images are the prototypes we have made, the colours are appealing and have a positive look to them, enticing people to participate in making their own.

Guerilla Gardening

Guerilla Gardening

The seed bomb idea has lead to guerilla gardening. These projects work with seed bombs to create pockets of colour and life around cities, originating in London. This is what we aim to replicate in our festival, creating this promotional poster to encourage participation through our festival. 

From this, we have taken to the city adding areas of flowers and greenery to unused spaces. We aim to make the city more green, adding more life back into the concrete city.

Seed Bombs

Guerrilla Gardening

Seed bombs are becoming more and more popular within built up areas. The idea behind them is that these small bombs, that can be throw to where ever you can reach, have everything inside of them to grow flowers. The example above is for a poppy bomb, thrown into an area where it begins to sprout. They all flowers to grow with near to no help or maintenance. This idea we want to collaborate into our festival, with the paper bombs that can be made with origami, these can be filled and thrown to create flowers around Manchester. 

Voyage

Voyage

Voyage was an installation in London that was made up of 300 floating paper boats. These were each made with an LED light, which allowed them to come alive at night in a rainbow of colours. It was created on Canary Warf by Aether & Hemera in 2012. With the origami paper boats that I have made for my zine, I want them to come alight with candles in the night time, to create an installation close to this. For the festival I would strive to have this duo be the designers behind it. 

Interaction - 2

Other ways in which the public can get involved are by the creation of a crown, a kite or a bomb. Each of these can be used around the festival. The crown will be made for smaller children to get involved, also it works upside down to create a small plant bed to create little garden pieces. The kite will be part of a roof top installation where people go and fly the kites that they have made through out the day. The bomb can be filled with seeds and ingredients that are key to make flowers grow. These can then be thrown into derelict areas to create gardens.

Manchester Canal

The festival is going to be made using unused spaces and areas that have been forgotten or unappreciated through Manchester. The canal that travels through the city is completely forgotten about, to the point where it seems to be under the city. Most people don't know where the canal really goes, where it begins or ends. 

The canal is quite nasty, dirty and full of rubbish. The festival can have a section that tries to help with this problem. We have come up with the idea of 'Canal Bombs', which are eco friendly, coloured, fizzing bombs that can be thrown into the river. We plan to have them physically appealing, in different colours which will fizz up and create something eye catching. However as want them to be eco-friendly and have some form of water purifying element to them, so they will help clean the canal instead of just adding more junk into it.

Public Participation

One of the main aspects of our festival is to create an environment for the public to get involved with, for the art to be made and appreciated through public participation. We have found it hard to think of ideas that will entice the public enough to take part. We have come up with some simple ideas that could be made into a participation booklet, with pages that can be removed and simple instructions of things to do in different areas.

A group that has captured the public's interest to the point where people willingly join in is 'Daily Tous les Jours'.

Daily Tous les Jours  

They have created pieces and ideas that people want to get involved with. The photographs that come from these events also are very intriguing.

Spaces

In order to plan a design festival that utilises un-used spaces and buildings, I needed to collate an idea of spaces that could potentially be used. All the images are from areas around Manchester.

Albert Hall

Bailey Mill

Harpurhey Swimming Pool

The old Train Station

An old Textile Mill

The Trend Boutique

by Sally Denton

Understanding trend forecasting

• Why are trends important?
• Methodology

“The future has already happened, its just that it isn't very well distributed yet” - William Gibson

• Macro – 3-5 years
• Transitional – 1-2 years
• Micro trends – 6 months

Trend Setter	Early Adopter	Trend Follower	Lagger
Introduction	Growth	Maturity	Decline

Designer

Brand

High Street

Discount

Forecasting

• Trend
• Life style
• Phase

Why are trends important?

• Right product, right place, right time
• Demanding customers
• Industry worth billions
• Overseas production
• Inspiration + direction

Publications

• Calin International
• Peclers Paris Top 4 are the most important
• Nelly Rodi
• Promostyle
• Trend Union
• Decipher
• Mudpie
• Trend bible

Online

• WGSN Online micro trends are the end of trends.
• Style sight Don't use as a source for new trends
• MPD Click

Trends

• Political
• Economical
• Social
• Technology
• And now environment

Global

• Socio-economics (PEST/E)
• Inspiration
• Customers – BRIC
• Events + Exhibitions
• Strengths

• Looking at innovators + artists

Colour

• Pivot colours
• Harmonies

2014 and beyond

• Science and technology in a perfect sotrm
• 3D Printer – will spark the next revolution
  - wants to print onto the mood
  - 3D printed photo booths

Age and Wellbeing

• 1 in 3 to have cancer, now at 1 in 2
• Death
• Morning
• 'Advanced style guide' celebration of older women
• Bill Gates, eradicating polio
• What makes some a genius or mentally unstable?

Poverty and Luxury

• Shift from east to west
• Looking to China and Brazil
• Olympics and world cup
• Products with meaning
• Simplifying things
• Simple materials
• Architecture

Radicalism and Humanitarianism

• Education, the elderly
• Companies – good vs bad (eg, TOMs vs Starbucks)
• Repairing products

Women, Men and Equality

• Over sexualisation of women
• Everything is sexualised
• More androgynous world, for both sexes
• Brotherhood

Consumption and Natural Resources

• 'Human planet'
• Allotments, harvest nature
• Create throw away fashion with dissolving fabrics
• Perfecting nature
• Consuming – ingesting perfume tablets

Ian Forrester - BBC

• Fire starter, his job is to think of crazy ideas that may or may not be possible to create.

• Magnus Lindkvist – Trend spotter
• The only way to predict the future is to make it happen
• Broadcast, missing context, body language, mood – story telling is about variables
• Perceptive media : “Using internet technologies and sensibility to create something closer to a personal theatre experience in your living room”
• Finding perceptive media – blue sky thinking, learn to think with no limits at all, no legal limits
• Matt Mason – T.E.D.com – 'The pirate's dilemma'
• Moving from the Explicit to the Implicit
• Explicit – doing something
• Implicit – things you do naturally/instinctively
• TV as wallpaper, a study has shown that is you are under 30 you will always have 2 screens on the go
• The Attention Economy – John Doe, from se7en 1995
• Deja vu moments
• Using effects against the user – say if you dislike a theme tune it could be replaced with a song from your itunes

www.Futurebroadcasts.com

• Story telling that you've never heard before

Manifestos

In the manifesto writing session we had to think of what our ideas are and what angles we will be starting our briefs from. There were a lot of similar ideas between people, such as making things to be sustainable, being more eco friendly, to stop making 'crap'.

Some of my personal ideas on a manifesto are :

Age and wellbeing 

What do people really value?

Do we value our time?

Grow your own

Educating in more useful areas

Global impacts

Recycling 

Blue Sky Thinking

Blue Sky thinking is not a concept I have used before within my work. I have always had a brief first and planned my work from that. Having a limitless starting point opened my mind to many more possibilities then trying to answer a brief. 

1. How can I relate blue sky thinking to individual practice?

2. What is the definition of Blue Sky Thinking?

3. How can you work as a collective whilst still maintaining own practice?

4. What tools and methods can be used for Blue Sky Thinking?

5. Are adverse and unfamiliar conditions conducive to Blue Sky Thinking?

6. How does Blue Sky Thinking affect the world?

7. How can we communicate Blue Sky Thinking to a general audience?

8. How important are practical outcomes in the real world?

9. What obstacles are there to Blue Sky Thinking?

10. Can we measure Blue Sky Thinking in terms of success and failure?

As a group we came up with questions then spent our day breaking off into sub-groups to try and answer these questions. A lot of the answers crossed over different questions, many of these resulting in our answers going around in many circles. This set of questions resulted in great combinations between people and also great arguments, which has spiralled into a mass of ideas for the project.