Between 2018 and 2024, Bristol + Bath Creative R+D offered a suite of support to the region’s businesses, creatives, artists and thinkers to experiment with new and emerging technologies, conduct research, and develop prototype products and experiences to share with the public. Together, we aimed to create a responsible environment for inclusive and sustainable innovation which put people, not technology, first.

CONTAINER

Container is a collaboration between UWE Bristol’s Creative Economies Lab and Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio.

Container is an online magazine that takes a human look at technology, exploring how people use it for creative projects, community-building and social justice. Set up in November 2020, it focuses on process over product, and collectivity and community over the successful individual, big tech and corporate greed.

The name and ethos of the magazine is inspired by Ursula LeGuin’s essayThe Carrier Bag of Fiction in which she tells the story of the container: the most humble, the most useful and quite possibly the first thing the human race invented. The container is the bag you put things in because they are “useful, edible, or beautiful” and because you want to share them with your community. It signifies what it is to be collectively human – expansive, communal, representational, and more about process than destination.