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‘There is no energy shortage, there is no energy crisis – only a crisis of ignorance.’ Buckminster Fuller
Over 250 years ago Britain’s Industrial Revolution began with steam, coal and innovation, causing a global ripple effect that has since launched us into the Anthropocene. Driven by new hydrocarbon energy sources, socio-political, economic and community structures were entirely re-established around harnessing energy and producing goods on a massive scale. An age of creative hyper-production and innovation that has never been seen before began. In Unit 5 we posit that those same raw ingredients of new energy forms and technological innovation are here again. However, this time we must design a cleaner, greener, brighter, more just and integrated community for an ecologically conscious and sustainable future.
In collaboration with the Norman Foster Foundation (NFF) and Advanced Nuclear and Production Experts Group (ANPEG), Unit 5 nurtures imaginative solutions to the challenge of net zero carbon for a new manufacturing revolution. This year each student was given a 10mW quantum cell to design a new, co-located industry in the heart of Harlech, North Wales. Their resulting projects combine entrepreneurial innovation and energy justice with a vision for making, fabrication, manufacture and assembly for a post-Industrial Revolution. Students reflected on the kinetic innovations of the past and looked to posit cinematic props for the future in the atmospheric, recently disused adult education college Coleg Harlech – to which we gained full access as a site for the projects.
High-value manufacturing and innovation is emerging across Wales in the form of global companies such as Airbus and General Dynamics. The UK company Space Forge is also headquartered in Cardiff, developing satellite factories able to produce materials in space that are impossible to manufacture on Earth. In Unit 5, drawing on nuclear power, we propose 21st-century net zero carbon industries that engage with the themes of energy justice, spherical economy, community empowerment, spaces of awe and spiritual or social gathering around a vibrant Protopian industrial ecology that empowers new ethical communities.