A weekend well spent
If you had to choose between spending a weekend enjoying London’s perhaps the last hot days of the summer outdoors, or be boiled in the Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Centre, which option would you pick? Well, call me crazy if you want but I chose the latter.
Of course there’s more to the story than this. Besides boiling indoors, we were making a magazine - in 48 hours that is. Steve and Jeremy had joined forces to create a live press office in an open, public place. When they asked me to join, my weekend plans got pretty much solved right there and then.
Southbank Centre is currently celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain. The weekend events are organised under different themes - this week being Power and Production. Over the weekend we saw rapid prototyping, 3D printing, household object hacking and many other interesting things. Enough to make a magazine from. And of course give this baby a name, the magazine was to be called Makeshift.
But none of the events, not to mention our magazine, would have happened without the people who took part. It’s hard for me to really say how many people got involved in the process. We were maybe around fifty people writing stories, taking photos, illustrating and designing all together. But that was just one side of it. The number of general public engaging with the project must have been hundreds. You could really see the social value of engaging people like this.
It was really nice to see people getting genuine interested in what we were doing. We had a constant flow of people from all ages coming to listen our team meetings, give opinions and ask questions. The public could also take part in the actual making of the magazine: we had set up different ways of getting content. A lot of story telling, opinion polls, and live drawing happened over the weekend. Engaging and interacting with people also worked well with the weekend’s theme.
The volunteers came from various backgrounds; some with more experience than others. But our shared interest was definitely the love for editorial design and publishing. One might think working with mostly total strangers might have been difficult. On the contrary the team found a mutual tone easily, which I found interesting looking from a sociological point. There certainly wasn’t anyone pushing their voice over others’, which helped us to establish a good team spirit.
Now that the project is over I would really like to thank all of those who took part of the project in its various stages and I hope to see more of similar kind of activity in the near future. It was fun!
To see more what was going on during the weekend, check out our Flickr, Tumblr and Twitter sites. The finished magazine is a 20 pages tabloid size issue printed by the Newspaper Club. I hope to get some images of it later. You can get your own copy from Southbank Centre this weekend, but be quick, they will run out like hot cakes!
Image credits, from top to bottom: Sharon McCabe, Amie Mills, Grégoire Bernardi and Amie Mills again.
