Chloe Meineck’s great grandmother, Winnie, suffered from dementia. But she could still play the piano by heart, the music triggering memories that brought her much joy.
And so it was that Meineck, 24, came up with the idea of the Music Memory Box – a small container that houses objects chosen by its owner that represent key memories. As each object is picked up, the box plays a piece of music, encouraging the owner to recall something from their life.
After moving to Bristol nine months ago, Meineck took up a craft and technology residency project at the Watershed complex, one of the city’s creative hubs, and developed a kit version of her box that can be assembled at home. Having trialled it with dementia patients, she is now seeking funding on Kickstarter to help her take her project to the next stage.
Meineck is typical of a new breed of technology entrepreneur, part artist, part engineer, who are mushrooming across Bristol.
Forget Silicon Roundabout; Bristol is fast gaining a reputation as the UK’s most technologically smart urban environment, a place that is trying to understand how the cities of the future can exploit the vast realms of data they will collect when even the most humdrum devices, from electricity meters to car number plate recognition systems, are wired together in what is commonly referred to as “the internet of things.” The buzz around Bristol – the only major English city outside London to make a positive net contribution to the national economy and which boasts the largest silicon chip industry outside Silicon Valley – is palpable.
A report released last week found that Bristol had the strongest creative industries sector of any large urban area in the UK, excluding London.
“There’s not really anything like it anywhere else,” Meineck said of the city’s technological spirit. “Maybe there are small pockets across London, but in Bristol it seems like the whole city is networked.”
And this makes for interesting collaborations. Last year, the Watershed invited two magicians to take up residency so that they could “explore the intersection between their own practice as magicians, and the possibilities offered by new technologies”. Other favoured projects include a “stone” that senses and reduces stress by generating music from a person’s heart rate, and an “internet-connected, personalised curatorial device that brings life to museum taxidermy”.
It seems a long way from the get big fast approach favoured by the venture capital firms that congregate around Silicon Roundabout in east London.
“In London there’s a lot of jumped-up kids with startups who are ballsy about how much their company is worth, and they’re looking for investment,” said Clare Reddington, creative director at Watershed. “Here in Bristol things are much more easy-going: there is a concentration on delivering really good stuff.”
It helps that the city’s independent mayor, George Ferguson, is a technology evangelist. “I believe that the best cities are the ones that embrace change and are prepared to look for new solutions to the great urban challenges, such as climate change, mobility, energy supply and caring for our growing older population,” he said. “Of course, in trying new things we shall sometimes make mistakes, but by working closely with business, with academia and, of course, with citizens, we can learn together in our live urban lab.”
So far most of the projects backed by the city council have been small-scale pilots involving smart meters. However, from next spring an old cable television network – which the council bought for small change nearly a decade ago and which, thanks to the addition of new superfast fibre, can support colossal data speeds of terabits per second – will turn the city into a giant test bed.
The project, a joint venture between the University of Bristol, whose supercomputer will crunch the data collected over the network, and Bristol city council, is unlike anything anywhere else.
“You will find telecoms companies that can replicate those speeds in laboratories, but we are making this sort of capability available in a real city,” said Stephen Hilton, director of futures at Bristol city council. Hilton drew a comparison with the work of the great Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette.
“When he replaced the drains and sewers in London, he built much more capacity than a city of that size needed at that point. One could argue that it was that overspecification that allowed London to grow. In some sense, we are trying to emulate that with a digital infrastructure.”
The huge bandwidth means that Bristol’s infrastructure will become not just “smart” – a network that can learn from the data travelling across it – but “programmable”, according to Dimitra Simeonidou, professor of high-performance networks at the University of Bristol.
The city’s fibre optics will in effect form an open, giant operating system that can learn from its citizens, while they, in turn, can use it to “customise their environment” by developing apps for it.
Last Friday lunchtime, during one of the Watershed’s regular free seminars, Dr Mo Haghighi, a research assistant at the University of Bristol, gave an example of how the new relationship between city and citizen can work.
Sphere, which stands for sensor platform for healthcare in a residential environment, will see scores of homes fitted with hundreds of monitors so sophisticated that they can work out how vigorously someone chops carrots, whether they eat in front of their TV, and how efficiently they walk up their stairs.
“Everything you can imagine will be monitored,” Haghighi said. The project will amass an unprecedented amount of data that will allow a better understanding of the relationship between lifestyle and preventable diseases, but it does raise questions about citizens’ privacy in the smart cities of the future.
“It’s not about creating a Big Brother surveillance culture,” Hilton said. “But there is a need for a conversation about how we create cities that are fun, entertaining, engaging, nice, liveable places.”
The conversation is one of the most important to be had in the 21st century. By 2017, the majority of people in the world will be living in urban areas.
In this sense, a programmable Bristol that reinvents the relationship between city and citizen offers a vision for how the future might unfold. “No other city has made a commitment to try this,” Simeonidou acknowledged. “This is a new paradigm.”
ALL POINTS WEST
■ With a population of more than 400,000, Bristol is the largest city in the south-west.
■ Astride the rivers Frome and Avon, it has been a wealthy trading port since Roman times and played a key role in England’s maritime trade in tobacco, wine, cotton and slaves.
■ Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designed the Clifton suspension bridge, which was completed in 1864. He was chief engineer on the Great Western Railway, linking Bristol to London, which enhanced the importance of the port of Bristol for shipping, with the first trains running in 1838.
■ Bristol has two universities, the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England.
■ It is the first UK city named European Green Capital and will hold the honour in 2015.
■ Bristol is home to more than 17,500 businesses, with a third of UK-owned FTSE 100 companies having a big presence in the area.