As part of the Reconstrained Design Group, led by James Auger and Julian Hanna, we won the International Cultural Innovation Prize 2017 from the contemporary art gallery, CCCB, in Barcelona.
The prize was for our project, The Newton Machine, which is a design manual and prototype for an energy storage machine, made by a local community using their own spare parts, expertise, and energy in the local landscape. We developed a version of the Newton Machine for the island of Eday, Orkney, with our colleagues at Community Energy Scotland and Eday Renewable Energy.
Photos from the exhibition opening
The CCCB jury, which included Laura Faye Tenenbaum, science communicator at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that “it empowers people to take responsibility and to use local resources and expertise to face their own challenges… The Newton Machine is honest in that it accepts that there is no universal solution to such a multifaceted issue as climate change”.
In October, we traveled to the island of Eday in Orkney, Scotland, to spend a week with our hosts (supported by the Eday Partnership). There, with the extraordinary self-determination of the islanders, plus the contents of their houses, bothies, and sheds, together we built the Eday Newton Machine in three days – from scrap parts and found tools.
I kept an ethnographic notebook during the whole project. And, as a result of my fieldwork, I wrote the poem ‘Newton Machine: an Instruction Manual’, which was exhibited at the gallery and published in the exhibition catalogue.
Film-maker, Aaron Watson, documented the whole three days in a short film, which was also shown as part of the CCCB exhibition.