RITUALS

1. Spaces & Places: To facilitate connecting with each other, resources will be provided for anyone to organise regular gatherings in free public spaces. The ritual of meeting, sharing problems, and looking for solutions can be hosted in many spaces. Modular pop-up kiosks can be used for free as a platform. Insights, inspiration, and thank-you notes can be added to a publicly accessible pinboard. A community-written blog will share achievements and challenges. Across all these spaces, mutual peer review will help to reflect on what challenges the community chooses to influence or accept. 

2. Sunday Sessions: A regular physical meeting where information is exchanged during an activity, such as a baking session, creative skill sharing, or a garage sale. The main aim of the ritual is to find and exchange hidden knowledge. It is inspired by rituals of women in community kitchens: singing and cooking together whilst also creating something together for each other. Before it starts, people decide on a location and a form of creation. It does not need to be cooking; it can be any activity, such as a garage sale or a film screening. They then define what will be created together, coordinate the logistics, and make sure they check in on each other if someone doesn’t show up – out of care, not control.

3. Tea & Tinkering: Shifting away from the formalities of meetings, “Tea & Tinkering” is a weekly get-together where villagers come together to share food and drink. The ritual starts before anyone even arrives, with people deciding together who’s bringing what. When everyone gathers, the focus is on making and mending: tinkering with ideas, fixing small problems, and experimenting with possibilities. Together they create a relaxed space to prototype solutions to everyday challenges in the village, testing ideas quickly and informally: sketching, building small mock-ups, trying things out on the spot. Conversations flow naturally between social time and problem-solving, so solutions grow out of shared experience rather than formal agendas. Over time, the ritual builds trust, shared ownership, and momentum. With the hope of turning neighbours into collaborators.

Shared Languaging

Rituals for collaboration were often envisioned as a gathering, where freely accessible and public spaces become shared meeting places. All rituals explored how to foster interaction and dialogue, as a basis for building trust and collaboration. The different mountain peaks and the various animals at the pond must first gather and learn about each other to build shared solutions. Across providing food and drink, free pop-up kiosks, reading clubs, film evenings, and live music, the red thread is finding ways to meet and connect with others physically. 

FORMATs

Formats are not one-off projects, but a repeating way of working that allows people to imagine futures together and share responsibility. The following formats respond to the prototyped public innovation infrastructure of the Museum. While the future can be explored in many ways and places, this stop communicates the core challenge of how to share responsibility when stewarding innovation. 

1. Personal and Shared Vision Statements: A repeated vision statement practice, where stakeholders, community members and museum staff come together to envision the future and understand each other’s needs and wants. As a jumping off point to crafting both personal and shared vision statements, people choose three objects from the museum’s collection to represent their vision for the future. Through object-led communication, this process can foster institutional community building and contribute to the slow process of changing mindsets.

2. Heritage of the House Collections: The museum holds a space for local people’s personal collections, and people from different generations and backgrounds come together to share the stories behind their collection. To ensure that museums are not static or only for observation it’s important to include and prioritise the stories of the people whose heritage they represent and showcase.

3. The Mobile Museum of the Obsolete: a two-fold format starting with simple and varied trust building and cross-generational activities, which are further built on with deeper programming. It will consist of monthly workshops where a group identifies objects or practices that will become obsolete in the future, such as bus cards in a sustainable future with free access to public transportation. 

Shared Languaging

Formats for collaboration radically reimagined the role of a museum and its collections. If we want to think about a future together, we need to understand where we came from and where or who we are today. Museums and their collections can use object-based storytelling, participatory curation, gamification, and learning through playing to bring people together in a free public space to play a part in collaboratively envisioning the future. 

MECHANISMS

Mechanisms are a structure, agreement, or practice that continues after the festival and keeps collaboration alive. The following mechanisms respond to the prototyped public innovation infrastructure of the Ongoing Festival. At this stop, we focus on the core challenge of how to create sustainable continuity and make meaningful things last. 

1. Continue the conversation: the goal is to complement the festival programming by creating mechanisms to continue the conversation and strengthen the community. Starting simply, each festival will share ideas, comments, or thoughts that will be passed on to a new person to develop further during the next festival. A recurring micro-publication such as a zine, blog, or mail-out will further support continuing the conversation. At a structural level further materials, spaces and events will be provided to meet each other, such as co-living experiments and residencies, and a community-driven garden to return something to the land, creating a circular and continuous foundation for the festival.

2. Meeting at the Crossroads: this mechanism will continue festival activities in a shorter form, taking place in different village locations that are uncommon for a festival (a schoolyard, a crossroad, a parking lot). These activities will help to celebrate the local environment with festival attitude. The focus here is to bring something from the festival, whether it is artists or work from the artists, the organising staff of the festival, or even the litter for crafting workshops. In the uncommon location, people will gather and celebrate their surroundings and getting-together as something meaningful.

3. Changing Lives through Culture: Modeled, and aspiringly named, after Cheltenham Festival’s “Changing Lives through Culture” ethos, this festival mechanism emphasises skill-sharing and experimentation. Every invited contributor leaves behind a transferable skill, method, or toolkit. A portion of festival resources supports documentation and open access sharing (guides, recordings, templates), allowing others to adapt and replicate what was created.

SHARED LANGUAGING

Mechanisms for collaboration were often visualised as people from different walks of life coming together and celebrating. There was an emphasis on sharing knowledge and skills with other people and the land, to ensure that the impact of the festival ripples beyond a single event. Recycling festival materials to make postcards and gifs, setting up a notice board to continue discussions, and providing free materials all aim to provide support for sustaining collaboration.

COMPASS 1

COMPASS 2

COMPASS 3