Future Places Toolkit: Engaging communities through augmented reality and performance

This article shares processes of engagement with practice-as-research in place-based performance and creative technology, specifically mobile augmented reality (AR). It addresses the application of methodologies from an AR performance, Uninvited Guests and Duncan Speakman’s Billennium (2018), in Future Places Toolkit (Clarke et al., 2020), an engagement activity for neighbourhood visioning and planning consultation. It outlines the steps taken to evolve Billennium beyond an artwork into a tool for use in citizen-led design, and to transfer practice-as-research in performance and technology to a professional architecture and community context, specifically Knowle West in Bristol, UK. By detailing the stages of this research and development process, key learnings will be shared with other researchers seeking to apply their practices to social and civic challenges, and to do so through working in partnership with creative industries and community-based organizations. Future Places Toolkit will be used as a case study to demonstrate the potential of applying approaches from practice-as-research to real-world problems and developing arts practices into products or services. Documenting and reflecting on the process of prototyping the AR toolkit disseminates procedures for commercializing creative research and leads to a critique of the drive to scale up. Future Places Toolkit is considered as a framework for co-creation with communities and interprofessional partners, and methods for responsible innovation are shared. While these are drawn from responsible technology development, they are transferrable to other professional fields and academic engagement, or to commercialization in different disciplines.