Bristol’s Green Digital Legacies

March 3, 2016   |   Digital Marketing
Nudge Digital
Nudge Digital

As the European Green Capital 2015 programme draws to a close in Bristol, it's a good time to reflect on the impact of some of the digital projects created from the £7 million award from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).    

The official Green Capital handover to Ljubljana in Brussels was on 9th February and any day now, Bristol City Council is due to release their Report of the Year. This will undoubtedly give a clearer picture of the benefit to Bristol's residents, businesses and visitors that this high-profile year has been.

Three of the most prominent digital projects created in Bristol's year as the UK's first Green Capital were unveiled to an international audience as part of the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, December 2015: 'The Bristol Method', 'Sustainable Learning' and 'Bristol Brain'. All have the potential to become pioneering digital legacies from our year as Green Capital. Bristol took a key role in the world's biggest climate change conference, with Mayor George Ferguson spending a week at the talks promoting Bristol?s innovative sustainability plans.

'The Bristol Method' (https://www.bristol2015.co.uk/method/), is an online toolkit created by the Bristol 2015 team and aims to help cities around the world go green. A series of online knowledge-transfer modules have been created, to help other cities understand and learn from Bristol's journey in becoming a more sustainable city.

'Sustainable Learning' website (https://www.sustainablelearning.com/), is a free education resource which aims to connect teachers and inspire children about sustainability learning. Bristol-based developers built this responsive Drupal site, which includes the award-winning Shaun The Sustainable Sheep game, with Aardman Animation.

Finally, 'The Bristol Brain', from the Council's Futures team, which promises to be a cutting-edge development in the smarter future planning of cities. Still in proposal stages, the aim is to create a 3D-printed large-scale city model on top of which, real-time data and analytics can be projected and visualised. Real-time pedestrian/traffic flows; energy use of buildings and even the air quality could be seen at a glance. The really ambitious part is to make the model into an immersive digital environment that will utilise virtual reality technologies to allow people to 'leap' into the city model.

At Nudge, we're looking forward to watching these projects grow and hopefully become evergreen legacies from Bristol's year in the international spotlight.