The Odd Factory is a performance workshop where participants immerse themselves in a semi-fictional world. To create this experience, we synthesized elements from speculative design, performative arts, and interactive workshops, leveraging world-building as a method to train participants in collaborative activity. It acts as a platform that aims to adapt and facilitate diverse stakehloders and needs such as:
- Newly formed teams and communities that want to explore embodied ways of getting to know each other and working collaboratively.
- Young people, university students, and other groups as a pedagogical tool for experiencing alternative forms of organising, and for generating ideas on the futures of work and technology.
- Organisations that want to explore and reflect upon their values and organisational models, and shift them towards inclusivity, safety, and care.
- Creating safe space and time during off-site events such as conferences, retreats, and away-days, where different futures can be imagined, prototyped, and tested.
The pilot workshop took place in November 2024 at the PGR Hub, University of Bristol. We entered the factory avoiding the usual introductions, typically based on professional identities, and instead got to know each other through a somatic approach inspired by the Theater of the Oppressed. According to the script, we were all workers of the factory, instructed to walk around the room and throw from our bags whatever was bogging us down.
We then formed groups, and followed the factory instructions. According to them, we had to generate the raw materials of the factory, that is, a number of actualised or latent skills, relations, or practices that we would like to take with us once we exit the factory and enter a better future. To avoid overly “clean” futures, the guidelines explained that “the machines of the factory are high-end and, unlike past ones, can now process odd materials rather than binary ones. Consider, therefore, ambiguous situations and moments of struggle, such as attending a funeral or confronting your boss, where feelings are blurred, and relationships are tested.”
But wishes and dreams need a material carrier, which is why the group sat around an assembly table to put together 60 cardboard “bricks.” After deliberating on how to better organize the assembly, participants agreed on a method and completed the task within 9 minutes. Well done, team.
With concrete and abstract materials at hand, the factory workers had to unify the two parts. Two manufacturing processes were available: 4D printing and Artificial (?) Intelligence. In the first making station, props of 3D printers had slots for the arms of participants, resembling theatrical costume. The humans behind the “machines” used clay to physicalise their wishes and integrate them onto the bricks (for example, by turning the brick into a little display case).
In the Artificial (?) Intelligence station, Jeremy, along with other participants, took turns visualizing participants’ dreams onto the bricks. The dream, written on a post-it, would act as a textual prompt that would activate the Artificial (?) Intelligence. Jeremy, a security assistant with a fine arts degree, symbolized both the creative and manual labour that underpins seemingly automatic computational processes. A bell would ring once the participants’ order was ready.
The final task was the assembly of the bricks into the “wall of futures”. For our future to be steady, people were tasked with its quality control, trying to make associations between the drawings and clay models in a way that would ensure the construction’s longevity. In the 1.5 hours of the workshop, we managed to create a wall of around 50 bricks.
The Odd Factory was co-produced with members of the Work Futures Community first established during my PhD. Through practical and symbolic acts, people worked together and unlearned the isolating and fragmented nature of formal work. The dialectical relation between abstract ideas and concrete labour and materials, the invisible work that sustains many things around us, from AI systems to a clean classroom, even the joy of doing a repetitive but creative and soothing task such as putting a cardboard box together with others, were all experienced and brought to light. Complex theoretical ideas were distilled into a series of interactive (and fun!) tasks, emphasizing alternative and accessible approaches to learning. The “wall of futures” stands as a material expression of individual creativity and social cooperation.
One last task was the performance of a cleaning ritual around the futures wall, which, in its final form, resembled an altar. The idea was to collectively tidy up the room as part of the workshop and not as an afterthought. Petra Trinci, a leading university cleaner and our ritual fairy, was unable to attend this time, and a simplified version of the task was performed. We hope to be able to repeat the Odd Factory, and perhaps run the cleaning ritual as well.
Creative Team
Paris Selinas
Jeremy Rice
Petra Trinci
Workshop Facilitation
Paris Selinas
Jeremy Rice
Design Consultant
Mark Selby
Film and Photography
Rhodri Prysor
With special thanks to
Mireia Bes Garcia
Ellie Hart
Ben Meller
The KWMC for making the props
And the people of the PGR Hub
The “Odd Factory” name was born out of a conversation with Matt Dowse.
The alternative factory signs were inspired by and serve as an homage to those created by James Greenland during our research for my PhD.