About the Film

This creative technology video follows FutureMakers, a 2016 programme of workshops Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (TWAM), now North East Museums, ran in partnership with the Manchester-based digital art organisation FutureEverything. Across four museums and galleries on Tyneside, the programme invited children and adults to use new technology to engage with the collections around them, not just to look, but to build, code and make. It’s the kind of creative technology video that works best close to the ground, following what people actually did with their hands rather than describing the programme from a distance.

Five Museums, Five Ways Into Making

The programme opened at Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead with Gadgets: Adventures in Design, where 7 to 11 year olds used the LittleBits electronics kit to design wearable objects inspired by the gallery’s collection. At Stephenson Railway Museum, Railway Codes brought together a team of thirty developers, makers, engineers, data scientists, artists and train enthusiasts for a ten hour hackathon, working with historic museum data and the modern UK rail network to build new digital prototypes. Discovery Museum hosted New Inventors, pairing two workshops for 7 to 14 year olds, younger children built with conductive dough, bringing it to life with light and sound, while older participants built their own synthesisers. At Arbeia Roman Fort in South Shields, TimeCraft had 7 to 14 year olds recreating the fort in Minecraft, working as digital archaeologists and architects to imagine what it was like to live there two thousand years ago.

A fifth strand ran at Great North Museum: Hancock, where sound artist Shelly Knotts led two workshops using Sonic Pi, teaching participants to turn the museum’s natural history data sets into sound. Five venues, five very different technologies, but the same underlying idea running through all of them: hand someone the tools a museum would normally keep behind glass, and see what they build with them.

Why Museums as Spaces for Making

“With Future Makers, we want to invoke the spirit of these creators by using our museums as spaces for playful experimentation and creative thinking. It’s about ingenuity from the past inspiring people to imagine and create new futures,” said John Coburn, Digital Programmes Manager for TWAM, when the programme was announced. FutureEverything’s Artistic Director and Founder Drew Hemment described it as “an absolute pleasure to be working with TWAM on this brand new programme, inspiring the next generation of makers, creatives, collectors and visitors.”

What the Workshops Actually Looked Like

The programme’s own ambitions come through clearly in the film itself. John Coburn puts it simply on camera: the aim was to encourage the public to come in, not to see the objects, but actually engage in the process of how they came about. That intention plays out differently depending on who’s talking. At Arbeia, one parent watching her sons build Roman barracks in Minecraft put it more plainly still: “The boys are big on Minecraft at home. I thought it would be nice for them to use it for something practical and educational, instead of just running around blowing things up and putting sheep everywhere.” Elsewhere, a young participant summed up the appeal of the whole programme in four words: “It’s epic. That’s simple.”

Filming a Multi-Venue Programme

Filming a programme spread across five venues and several months meant no single day could carry the whole story, and no single creative technology video like this one holds together unless the shoot moves at the pace of whatever’s actually happening in the room. Each workshop had its own rhythm, a quiet hour of concentrated sketching at Shipley, a genuinely frantic ten hours at the Railway Codes hackathon, and the filming had to move with that rather than impose a single pace on all of it. The most useful material rarely came from asking children what they were making, it came from just watching them make it, and catching the parents and facilitators talking almost to themselves about what they were seeing happen in front of them.