What intervention you propose to work on and what technology tool

you would want to use in this intervention.

The project aims to explore the meaning of belonging to a place, when it
comes to communities forced to accept very dramatic changes - of culture,
language, lifestyle - and still trying to make themselves at home.
Im particularly interested in urban areas in which newly settled communities
of migrants/refugees are highly concentrated and therefore the reported
number of hate crimes is higher. The aim is to foster reciprocal understanding
and curiosity between communities culturally distant, yet living close to one
other, by interacting with the borough they all live in.
I intend to use the urban fabric, furniture and infrastructures, together with
open source technologies, to create a physical-digital space for storytelling:
mapping an apparently neutral urban space through the lenses of different
cultural mind sets.
Starting point would be the planning of a series of workshops progressively
building, each time with a group of people representing a different community
(with the same country of origin, language), a map of the local territory,
highlighting the informal networks and soft services available to its members rich in meaning and value only to that specific group. Such material would be
collected in the shape of audio-video memories and graphically rendered as
part of a culture-specific map.
Following step would be to use the material gathered as content of an
interactive platform, containing a series of culture-specific guide accessible by
anybody walking around the city, with a smartphone. The use of portable
local wi-fi media servers, distributed along the borough of interest, would in
fact allow to access certain digital material only from the very place it refers
to. Such devices would create a digital framework, overlapping with the urban
one, that inhabitants themselves are free to explore, as much as modify
according to changes taking place in the community.
Explain how and why technology is central to this intervention. What is
your theory of change for using your proposed technology tool in this
process?
The use of technology would allow users to interact with the surroundings
without limiting the intervention to a fully physical or digital platform. If printed
publications represent a quite traditional way of collecting stories, digital
storytelling platforms are also a not so new idea. The neutral nature of such
platforms makes them perfect to support the recording of narratives on a
global scale, but makes it much harder to leverage such stories to engage a

specific community. Combining both digital and printed material aims to link
the best from both approaches into a unique solution.
As soon as a pilot with an active community of participants has been
successfully developed, the open source nature of the project would make it
possible to keep the platform alive outside of the duration of the fellowship.
Aim of the intervention would be in fact to create a tool that is relevant to the
community it refers to and whose members have the skills to fully control
(both the content shared and technology used). Tools to set up such an
intervention would be made accessible to potentially very different
stakeholders, by simply sharing online the technical resources required
(based on low cost physical computing tools such as raspberry pi) and
compiling a method kit to guide the workshop activities.
Therefore, the intervention has potential to be scaled up - nationally or
internationally. The capability of the technology chosen to easily interact with
mundane devices such as smartphones would allow a potentially wide
audience to take part in or just stumble across the project while leaving their
wi-fi on. My effort aims not to be only classified as a design/art project, but
has the potential of becoming a tool to promote culturally diverse tours of a
city and being used by local authorities as a research tool to craft effective
inclusion policies.
Where does the intervention take place?
The intervention would start by targeting a specific urban area/borough with a
particularly high number of minority ethnic communities, where the need for
social regeneration and cohesion is felt as a priority. Being my work based
between the UK (particularly London) and Italy, and having previously
developed contacts with Italian and English forums and charities dealing with
vulnerable immigrant communities, I would aim to establish a pilot in both
countries. I believe it would help to get a comparative overview of how the
project could need adjusting to fit specific cultural contexts in the
perspective on eventually scaling up the intervention.

How do you propose to engage key stakeholders in designing both the

process and the technology for your intervention?

Having a general layout of my intervention, I aim to reshape process and

outcomes as much as possible with the contribution of the local communities I
would engage with, in order to enhance a feeling of ownership in the people
involved. Engagement with community members would happen through preexisting culturally/nationally-specific associations and local charities, that are

particularly popular between newly settled migrants struggling to adapt to a

new cultural context.
The workshop activities might be introduced side by side with already existing
programmes or meetings such as English classes aimed at improving
literacy skills and facilitating socialisation . I would be interested in further
developing the structure of my intervention together with local authorities
(such as local councillors, offices and projects within the council working on
social inclusion strategies). This way, it would assure outcomes have proved
relevance to authorities and can be used as a research tool to better
understand cultural diversity and adequately address social exclusion.

What do you hope to achieve? Tell the main results of your intervention
and provide a project plan that outlines the activities to achieve these
outputs.
I aim to start a pilot of the project, in partnership with local communities and
administration, in at least one borough/city.
Initial months would be dedicated to establishing partnership with a series of
key communities strongly represented in the chosen area. Following that, a
series of workshops would be run, with the aim of mapping the surrounding
territory and collecting culturally specific stories, memories and insights in
digital form (video, audio, text).
The technology required to develop an efficient yet simple to use wi-fi media
server would be in the meanwhile researched and tested. Underlying aim
would be to include workshop members into the management of such
devices, by teaching them how to interact with them, perform basic coding,
maintenance and updates.
Once digital content and technology have been established, a series of
portable devices would be distributed across the public areas of the borough,
particularly in the locations pinpointed during the previous workshop activities.
The map drafted during the research would be used as a representation of
the world according to each community and guide users through the
physical discovery of the area. For each location, the partial information
contained in the map would be completed only by physically reaching the
place it refers to, where the digital content is stored.