What we do
We use cultural and artistic means to democratise digital technology, crafting citizen projects of open innovation with societal impact.
Objectives
The Bit Lab Cultural association is a non-profit organization located in the Sant Andreu del Palomar district of Barcelona. The association is oriented towards the realization of projects of cultural innovation in the territory and with social return.
Bit Lab was born in the beginning of 2017 and is made up of professionals with more than 10 years of experience from the world of cultural and social innovation, audiovisual and cinema, the music industry, design and of the communication.
Our general objectives are:
To bring culture closer to society through innovation projects.
Implement interdisciplinary cultural projects with citizen participation.
Encourage collaboration between social, cultural, public-private entities, the university and artistic collectives.
To bring closer the possibilities of culture to the schools and facilities of proximity, paying special attention to the connection with the social base groups.
Take advantage of digital technology and the Internet to establish new communication channels to promote local culture.
Methodologies
To be able to co-design, prototype and implement projects of cultural and social innovation in the territory - in a co-participated way with the citizen communities -, we use techniques and methodologies from the world of technological and open innovation, design centered on user and citizen participation. At Bit Lab we start from the following research-action premises:
1.
Laboratory Cities
The cities-laboratories opt for an open and transformative, system-based open innovation and innovation for the citizen. The city-laboratories intend to open the new system of innovation to the citizens as a whole, to transform the whole city into an open and universal system of innovation.
2.
Open and Participatory Innovation
In order to be able to effectively implement user-centered and focused innovation processes, ad hoc hybridization techniques from the world of design thinking and UCD (user-centered-design) must be adopted and designed.
Below is a list of methodologies we commonly use to design open and citizen-centered innovation environments:
3.
User-driven innovation
The design and implementation of user-led innovation projects must be understood as processes of RDi complexes to detect, devising, experimenting and validating new systems of relationship and interaction between civil society agents.
The user-led innovation projects tend to have the following implementation phases:
At all stages, the citizen must be understood as an active subject present in all phases of the execution of the project (not only in the validation of the same as traditionally in technology-based projects) and that it is the citizen who directs, participates and It leads decision making from phase 0 of the project.
We commonly use the following list of methodologies to co-design open innovation environments centered on the citizen.
Processes
The methodologies we adopt can be grouped into 3 major processes (Situate / Prototype / Validate) to be able to characterize and dynamise the innovation communities according to their idiosyncrasies and the territory.
A. Situate
The contextualization phase is articulated through co-design processes with community participation based on ethnographies and co-creation dynamics with municipal agents and the neighborhood.
B. Prototype
Design a prototype of innovation related to the city challenges present in the call and with a final objective of real implementation in the ecosystem.
C. Validate
Implement a pilot in the territory with citizenship to be able to validate and detect possible improvements, to be able to make iterations and that the solution proposal responds to the real needs of the citizens.
Activities
The Bit Lab Cultural Association is a non-profit organization that is characterized by bringing culture closer to society through
Projects of cultural innovation to publicize cooperative and feminist cultural production ecosystems.
Training workshops, training and digital literacy for cultural agents.
Pedagogical workshops for schools and training centers based on musical and artistic projects.
Technology-based cultural productions to introduce the social agents of the territory to the possibilities of digital technology and the Internet.
Interdisciplinary cultural productions for the generation of cultural digital heritage.
Innovation projects tend to have phased activities
Participation
Community action
Participatory festivals
Community participation processes
Cultural production
Idea
Scenario design
Analysis and mapping of agents
Exploration of resources and assets
Elicitation of user needs and interests
Prototype
Solution design
Design of prototypes and pilots
Open call management
Challenge design
Experiment
Project design
Pilot implementation
Cultural project engineering
Community mediation and project management