Open Project Night brings imagination and creativity to Dudley High Street
In September 2015 Impact Hub Birmingham launched Open Project Night, an initiative that embedded our key value of generosity within a bold, creative and courageous vision. It’s purpose was to support the people of Birmingham, both members and non members, to take that next step to make their ideas and dreams a reality.
OPN is therefore not just an initiative, it os an approach to engage people with our key values and our shared mission…
In order to do this, we believe we need an environment whose physical and social habitat reflects the community it serves. For us this is a welcoming and malleable space where eclectic individuals can collaborate to tackle some of the most wicked problems we face as one. ~ Open Project Night Playbook, Impact Hub Birmingham
Since initiating Open Project Night and producing the Play Book, Impact Hub Birmingham has become Civic Square (they are also one of CoLab Dudley’s Learning Partners) and Open Project Night has been adopted by Impact Hubs around the world.
Now that we have a dedicated lab space on Dudley High Street, a growing collective of Time Rebels, and (by Autumn 2021) an increasingly vaccinated population, we thought we would test the appetite for an Open Project Night in Dudley. (We previously experimented with Open Project Night in summer 2017, when we were in shared premises on the High Street. However we hadn’t worked on growing a collective at that time, so there wasn’t a web of relationships among people ready make use of such an opportunity.)
The invitation
We dipped our toes in the water by launching a monthly season of Open Project Nights at CoLab Dudley. This was our invitation:
One evening a month we are opening the doors of CoLab Dudley extra wide so that people can dream, make and do together. Open Project Night is an invitation to imagineers working on ideas, experiments, projects and ventures focused on a kinder, more creative High Street and town to come together.
Creatives, entrepreneurs, dreamers, makers and doers; everyone is welcome to come along to add their unique contributions and gifts to nurture new futures for Dudley.
Are you curious about what’s going on in this lab on the High Street?
Come along to Open Project Night. Meet people who are testing ideas and quietly making change in the town. Join a drop-in or group activity, or simply have a chat with CoLab Dudley team members and Time Rebels who might be around.
A promising start
The first to arrive when we opened the doors at 5pm for October’s Open Project Night were local people keen to collage. This was the first convening of Black Country Collage Club in person since Do Fest Dudley in mid-summer.
👇 At 6pm CoLab Dudley Time Rebels Helen and Bill hosted a short talk about the process of developing and evolving their More-Than-Human High Street experiment. An exhibition of found objects, images and more-than-human sounds was currently installed in the lab.
Then it was time to get writing!
👆 Connect Dudley is a creative writing project convened by CoLab Dudley Time Rebel Rick. A group has been meeting and growing online since the first lockdown in 2020. This Open Project Night was the first opportunity Connect Dudley writers had to come together in person, and were joined by other group members on Zoom at the same time.
Stories of Place
November’s Open Project Night was a platform for the launch of Stories of Place. This is an invitation from Time Rebel Holly Doron to experiment with different creative ways we can tell stories of Dudley High Street.
👆Local people who joined the session were first invited to share a short story of Dudley’s past, present or future. Here are some of them:
When I first came here, I kind of found it a little bit hostile and kind of messy and so on. But actually over time, through the projects that we’ve done and spending time here I’ve realised that it’s not like that at all really. Well you can take it like that if you want, but you don’t have to. And there’s a lot of possibilities.
I like the fact that Dudley sits on the backbone of Britain. And I think that rain falls on Dudley Town Centre, depending on which side of the High Street it falls either goes through a Tame and the Trent and the Humber on the east coast or the other side it goes to the Stour and the Severn on the West Coast. And I think that’s quite a nice unusual fact about the town centre.
My story of Dudley would be to imagine it as a jungle where new plants and animals can live on the street.
Dudley used to be under water.
Next everyone shared different ways that they express themselves creatively. This was followed by a 20 minutes Street Detectorism activity; getting out and about on the High Street with a clue, a map and a question. After reconvening to share stories from this, ideas for generating Stories of Place were explored. In the lab note below Holly shares the journey to this session at Open Project Night and some of the creations which emerged as a result of it. Stories of Place is now taking place monthly at Open Project Night.
We ran out of chairs!
At Open Project Night in December 2021 an amazing 4 projects took place in our lab space at the same time! We ran out of chairs!
👆Lab team member and Time Rebel Kerry O'Coy hosted a Dudley Creates creative project planning session bringing together creatives, organisations and people interested in creating a culture programme across Dudley borough in 2022.
👆Time Rebel and poet Rick Sanders ran a session to share and close his Poetry of Place project which ran through 2021, inviting explorations of Dudley High Street through poetry, and creating connections to local businesses with offers of poems. Using an aperture collage technique at Open Project, local people generated found poems from Rick’s poems about and for the places on the High Street.
👆 Architecture student and Time Rebel Kirren invited local people to create a More-Than-Human Story of Dudley High Street. This invitation built on Kirren’s experience of taking part in Bill and Helen’s More-Than-Human High Street experiment in summer 2021, and November’s Stories of Place session described above.
👆Architecture student and Time Rebel Jasmine invited people to explore how technology could assist in empowering citizens in planning processes. Jasmine has been asking people what stage of participation people are at and where they’d like to be. Technology is seen as a means to an end — a way to connect people with physical happenings in their areas.
And as Holly noted on twitter, all these new ideas were hatching surrounded by creative treasures from the Growing Up In Dudley and BCU School of Architecture and Design’s Extinction Rebellion Architecture exhibitions. 💫
By December 2021, Open Project Night really was proving to be a well received invitation to join CoLab Dudley’s Time Rebels and collaborators to dream, experiment, learn and do together.
These creative and unusual projects and experiments invite long-term thinking and nurture our imaginative capacities. They are generating hundreds of ideas for desirable futures for Dudley High Street, and testing out steps towards some of these futures. These futures see Dudley High Street as a place of cultural nourishment, where people convene, collaborate, make and do together.
Open Project Night itself is one of the steps towards a future we desire. It is becoming a mini-festival of doing in one evening, with multiple activities taking place in the same place at the same time. It is an open invitation to anyone interested to drop-in to join activities or simply come along to find out more about what we’re up to.
We decided to host Open Project Night twice a month in 2022, and though we then had to take it online in January due to covid restrictions, projects and activities continue to evolve through it.
👉 You can visit Doing in Dudley to find out what’s coming up on open Project Nights, and see other activities taking place on Dudley High Street as we step into spring.
