2019 Festival of Maintenance
This year's Festival of Maintenance takes place in Liverpool on Saturday 28th September. Maintenance is a fascinating topic, cutting across so many parts of our lives and our world, and yet often neglected in how we think about things. Last year's event was very well received and we were delighted to be covered by the BBC World Service and in the Economist, suggesting that perhaps it's the start of a new surge of interest. So the 2019 Festival is a great opportunity to find out why maintenance matters, and to explore maintenance in a complex and changing world.
Tickets are just £15 and we have some great speakers and intriguing themes lined up:
We start with opening talks from Donna Young, Herbarium Curator, Liverpool World Museum, on keeping dead things dead, and Ben Ward on community IoT sensor networks as a self-made burden.
Climate crisis
With environmental factors so certain, our built environment will require a far higher value placed on maintenance than at present. What happens when we have no longer have the luxury to ignore it? Shannon Mattern will speak about decoupling and the maintenance mindset.
Boring revolutions
We think maintenance is a key part of everyday life and how we relate to each other. If communities - indeed whole countries - really are fragmented, are 'boring revolutions' part of the answer? With Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs on radically redesigning our institutional infrastructure for a more democratic and distributed future, and Tom Forth on data as infrastructure, and the need to maintain the availability and quality of data in order to power efficient modern services in both the private and public sector.
Emerging technology, anxious maintenance
Lydia Nicholas on automation and social care, Jack Stilgoe on self driving cars, governance and ethics, and David Baglee on the promise of predictive maintenance.
Fragility
We know we need to look after fragile things, from roads to CD Roms. But what happens when people don't realise they are fragile? Speakers Mia Ridge (digital curator at the British Library) on digital collections, self-taught mender Tom van Deijnen on visible repair, textile skills and supply, and Mujib Rahman, who researches resilient infrastructure, on the cost of potholes.
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Without continuous care, urban systems are prone to breakdown. But which are deemed the most important? Architect and urbanism researcher Juliet Davis on social housing maintenance and the ethics of care, plus Ed Saul from Liverpool John Moores University on how we can build bridges in the future.
We also have Jeni Tennison from the Open Data Institute talking about collaborative ways to maintain data, a critical part of the world this century.
We hope you can join us in September. If you can't make it but would still like to support the Festival, which is run by a small group of volunteers on a non-profit basis, we accept donations which will help us run a great event, and would also be delighted to hear from potential sponsors.
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