Penmachno Community Hub Design Sprint & Digital Skills Taster Session
Back in March 2019 Clear Village Project Lead Kristin Johanna Luke led a community hub sprint and open day, teaching digital skills and fabrication techniques to reimagine the local Welsh tapestry unique to Penmachno, and to develop design ideas for a future community hub in the area.
Penmachno is situated deep in the Machno valley of Snowdonia National Park, in the county of Conwy in North Wales. Nearby is the now abandoned Machno Woollen Mill; for the duration of the 19th century the mill was at the centre of life in Penmachno and is still remembered by many of the residents.
This project consisted of two sessions, focused on the old school building pictured below. It is currently used as a community hall and part of the event was to discuss how they would like to use and develop the space to serve the future community of Penmachno. Both sessions were built on the work of Mark Gahan and Rural Futures, an initiative that works to identify and support rural communities in planning and delivering the improvements they want to make. Mark works for Severn Wye and the sessions were funded by a National Lottery Rural Futures micro grant.
The first session consisted of a digital taster day, introducing intergenerational members of the community to digital design and fabrication techniques used at Machines Room.
The free-to-use digital design software Inkscape was demonstrated and taught, showing that there is free accessible software available to learn vector designing without the need for expensive programs and machines, so that any of the participants can continue to explore this from home or the community centre.
Inkscape was used to show how to convert a scan of the traditional Welsh tapestry, historically unique to Penmachno, into a digital file that can be used by fabrication machines.
This file was then sent to a Vinyl cutter which automated cutting out the complex design. Once the vinyl was prepared, Kristin then demonstrated how to use the heat-press to transfer this onto tote bags. This gave the participants a tangible outcome that they could take away and prompted discussions of how this could be sold in the local corner shop to both tourists and locals, promoting pride in local history whilst generating income to fund future projects.
When bringing new skills and techniques into a community such as Penmachno, it’s useful to incorporate the local history and craft to respect and preserve local tradition whilst inspiring new generations with 21st-century fabrication skills. It also encourages involvement from many of the elder generation in the community, who remember the mills that ran in the area, helping fight isolation and encourage intergenerational community bonding through continued discussion of local history.
“I wanted to bring my son along because it looked really interesting, it’s something [digital design and manufacture tools] that we don’t get round the Village. I liked the fact that it brought loads of different people here, different people, different ideas, young and old which I thought was great. I think we’ve got a really good village, but I’d like to see, I like the idea of the mixing of ages, you know, I think we’ve talked about it tonight, about a lot of skills that are in the Village and I’d like to see them used… Not losing old stuff, but also implementing new ideas, and we’ve seen that tonight.”
The second planned session within Penmachno was a community hub design sprint, teaching and using CAD. The aim of the hub sprint was to add to and design the Old School House model in SketchUp to generate feedback about what the design should look like. CAD is another great skill to teach in these contexts as it is something that the participants can continue to learn and explore with free programs to build up new skills that may help them gain employment. It also allows participants to start to imagine potential futures within the context, being able to see their ideas come to life on screen.
The second aim of the design sprint was to gain feedback from the local residents about what they would like to see in a new Community Hub. Mark Gahan facilitated this feedback session, helping the residents speculate on what they need as a community. This generated more discussion and ideas for the Hub’s design, notes from which will be used in ongoing contributions to the design, by working with the Old School House Trust.
“I think theres been a good variety in the people who’ve come, I think it’s brought out people who wouldn’t normally come to the Old School House, theres been a few new faces and thats been really positive. It’s got everyone talking and everyone a bit enthusiastic about what we could come up with here on the creative side of things, and I love my bag to go home with!”
Most fab labs and makerspaces in the UK are located in City and town centres; whilst this means they can benefit a larger audience, it can also mean that rural spaces are left out, and can contribute to youth migration, a recurring issue across North Wales and other rural areas.
Some of Kristin’s work is inspired by the Pack Horse Library Project, a Great Depression-era Works Progress Administration programme run predominantly by women which brought library collections to remote communities of the Appalachians. Building on this tradition and the still-thriving network of mobile van-based services operating across rural Wales, Kristin hopes to build a mobile maker van to bring the tools and equipment found at Fablabs to remote Welsh communities, giving participants access to new skills and opportunities. We are continuing our research and partnership building in these communities to realise the maker van project, and to enable even more community workshops like this in the future.
email kristin@clear-village.org for any enquiries.