A 21st Century Community Innovation Workshop (a work-in-progress)
The following summary introduces the concept of a re-imagined community workshop. The idea of a 21st Century community workshop was first inspired by the Mt. Elliott Makerspace located in a Lower East Side Detroit church basement. The current project re-imagines such a space at Incubator 13 located in the former Rideau High School in Ottawa, Canada.
We envisage a concept for 21st century community innovation workshop as a safe space, accessible to the public and intentionally designed to unleash a community’s potential to imagine, innovate and create.
The idea of a 21st century community innovation workshop represents a new type of “Third Places” that serve a valuable function as social spaces for communal interaction and as places that help in the formation of vital social bonds.
We re-imagine the 21st century community innovation workshop as both a social infrastructure that is accessible to the public and to the diverse locally-based community service organizations and civic voluntary associations. Further, as a purpose-built space a community innovation workshop will also serve as a platform for enabling the creation of self-organized community networks. In this sense, a community platform invites conversations and dialogues, encourages idea and knowledge sharing, collaborative and self-directed learning, experimentation and co-creation.
As both a social infrastructure and platform for community-level creative projects, this newly re-purposed space has the potential to augment the capabilities and offerings of neighboring not-for-profits and local volunteer groups that provide vital services to marginalized and underrepresented groups. A community innovation workshop can serve critical socio-economic needs of a locality. On the one hand, economic impacts might refer to a space where one can develop new skills, enhance employability prospects, discover career paths and catalyze entrepreneurial endeavours. On the other hand, community social benefits can accrue by fostering a sense of belonging, opportunities to contribute to a common good and a source of mental well-being through creative personal projects.
