The weekend London turned code into craft

At the Southbank Centre, Peckham Digital brought together artists, coders, makers and musicians to show what happens when technology stops being something we simply consume.

Earlier this month, seventeen artists and collectives took over the Southbank Centre with electronic looms, 3D clay printers, robots, live coding and a simple proposition: technology shouldn’t belong only to specialists.

The weekend was curated by Peckham Digital, a community interest company built around creative computing. But this wasn’t a conventional technology showcase.

The emphasis was on getting involved.

Visitors could design digital tiles, experiment with computational art, watch code become music and encounter a loom that brought traditional weaving together with electronics. The programme mixed installations and performances with drop-in workshops designed so that people could continue experimenting after they went home.

That last part is what caught our attention.

We spend a lot of time talking about access to technology in terms of devices, connectivity or skills. Peckham Digital approaches it from another direction: give people permission to make something with it.

Its philosophy is deliberately collaborative – what it calls a “do-it-with-others” approach, using peer learning and practical experimentation to make creative technology feel less like a specialist discipline and more like a material anyone can pick up and explore.

There’s something important in that.

As AI, robotics and other emerging technologies move further into everyday life, most of us experience them as finished products. Someone else builds the system. We press the button.

But creativity tends to happen before the edges have been tidied away.

When a textile artist encounters electronics, when a musician encounters code, or when a ceramicist gets hold of a 3D printer, the interesting question isn’t simply what the technology was designed to do.

It’s what else could it do?

That is why spaces like this matter. They make technology tangible enough to question, pull apart and repurpose – and bring together people who might otherwise never find themselves working on the same problem.

You don’t always get new ideas by going deeper into your own field.

Sometimes you get them by leaving it.

At the Future Forum Flagship in King’s Cross this October, we’ll be creating more of those collisions – bringing different disciplines, industries and perspectives together to see what emerges.