We acknowledge the Turrbal and Yuggera people as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this work was made. We acknowledge all the people of the lands that make this work possible. We recognise the continuing connection to lands, waters, and communities of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We pay our respect to Elders, past, present and emerging, and commit to standing with our First Nations people.

The idea for the Chatty Bench originally came from a FaceBook post I received about twelve months ago. In the post, it was called Happy to Chat Bench. Outside the Exchange community centre where I work, we have a public bench where people sit with devices and headphones and hook into our free wifi. There was seldom interaction between the bench users. So I made a sign and stuck it on the bench and added 'sit here, if you don't mind people stopping to say hello'. To my delight, the community responded positively and before long the sign became a talking point. We took this humble idea and, in collaboration with Kavita (QUT Design Lab) and Sam (Village Church), have turned it into this fun, digitally-based project called Chatty Bench Project. We hope that, in the future, colourful Chatty Benches will be scattered throughout Kelvin Grove Village to encourage the community to sit awhile and get to know their neighbours.

Cait Wildman | Communify

CHATTY BENCH PROJECT

With the aim of combatting loneliness and social isolation, the Chatty Bench Project is a community collaboration between KGUV PBC, Communify, Village Church & QUT Design Lab. The project brings together local stories of Kelvin Grove Urban Village residents with art, performance and locative media technology: enabling one to engage in a hybrid (physical and digital) urban design and placemaking project. The project is situated in the Kelvin Grove Urban Village and use its many landmarks and places as engagement locations.

TECHNOLOGY

The stories were built using Twine. Faced with COVID-19 Pandemic, the workshops were conducted via Google Classroom, Zoom, Slack and Hubs by Mozilla in the months of July-August 2020. The virtual exhibition took place in August 2020 on Hubs by Mozilla. Once restrictions eased in Brisbane and conducive for larger gatherings, we had our face-to-face exhibition in October 2020.