Institute For The Future

Open City/Art City Festival RFP - We Need You!

Calling all artists, critical, and speculative designers—we need you to imagine the future of cities!

Our Technology Horizons program is teaming up with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to engage the public through a creative and generative weekend that looks at how we transform a city—and we need you!

Bring your visions and provocations to life at the Open City/Art City Festival on October 4 in San Francisco, organized by the Institute for the Future and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Join a group of artists and futurists to provoke the public’s imagination about the future of open cities. You’ll get a stipend, placement in a prominent one-day public exhibition, and the opportunity to influence the global conversation about the future of cities. 

Your RFP Response: An Overview

Your response to this RFP should be a 300-400 word description of your proposed project detailing your idea, design, construction process, desired impact, and proposed interaction that fits the contexts and limitations described over the next couple pages. Please also include visual illustrations or related images to help us to visualize the visual realization of your ideas.

Please email your completed proposal with the title Response to RFP to Alex Goldman at [email protected] no later than midnight PST on August 27. When your submission is received you will receive a confirmation email.

Why Open Cities/Art Cities? The Details

In cities throughout the world, citizens and entrepreneurs are becoming a force alongside government and industry to develop and improve wherever they live. They are tapping into social networks, open economies, mobile phones, wireless sensors, vacant buildings, 3D printers, alternative currencies, and a maker mindset to solve problems and seize opportunities for change. These open city builders are creating entire systems, services, and infrastructures that complement and compete with those offered by traditional civic institutions. In cities around the world this will be a decade of massive experimentation coming from entirely new sources from the bottom up—making cities smarter, more transparent, and participatory so they work better for all who inhabit them.

In Detroit, enterprising citizens are stepping up to fill in budget gaps, map the city’s blight, and even create their own transportation and housing services. In Mexico City, looming water shortages are driving many creative responses from students and startups, from retrofitted slums with open source water catchment devices to luxury “water cafés” in exclusive neighborhoods.

In the next two decades cities will face the future first, including some of our most daunting challenges of climate change, aging and growing populations, resource shortages, and unstable food and water supplies. But cities are also crucibles of innovation and opportunity, where the density of people and connective technologies will make new solutions sprout, scale, and replicate faster than ever before.

IFTF and YBCA seek original, speculative designed experiences and artistic interpretations of Open Cities in the year 2024 or beyond to debut at the OpenCity/Art City Festival on Saturday, October 4, 2014. In our selection we will prioritize submissions that focus on all of these elements:

1. STORY

There is no one exact story for what Open Cities will look like in the future. Some will be ‘smart’ metropolises outfitted with inexpensive sensors. Others will gain their intelligence in a more patchwork way, from grassroots networks of citizens adding data and reports as witnessed on the ground. Some are dystopian, some utopian, but most are in between.

Think about a movie, novel, or game set in the future that stuck with you for days afterwards. The best visions for the future aren’t disconnected from the dilemmas and issues of the present, if anything, they shed a new light on current dilemmas. Art, narratives, and media set in the future offer a “safe space” to provoke and advance discussions of present-day complexities.

2. INTERACTION

Start with your own vision of an Open City in the future. We want to provide the public with an immersive, visceral, hands-on experience of Open Cities in the future. Each project must have a physical component in some medium—interactive digital media, constructed object, installation—that offer visitors a compelling sense of what life in your Open City would be like. You can translate your story into public interactions in any form—but think beyond simply viewing; we are looking more for things like reimagined street kiosks than futuristic billboards.

If your piece requires a human attendee (most likely you) to mediate the interaction, that is fine; however, it should also function as a stand-alone without human attendees (even if the interaction is greatly reduced). Your project should be a “snapshot” of your city, as though it were cut-and-pasted from it, rather than presenting a narrative from an outsider’s perspective.

3. TOPICS: SYSTEMS + SERVICES

We foresee a future where cities are playgrounds, toolkits, and skunkworks for experimental policies, cheap technologies deployed on a mass scale, and new stories of citizens and entrepreneurs leading our responses to the 21st century challenges and amazing opportunities. Your project may (but does not need to)reflect a new kind of approach to life in cities—think on a grand, city-widescale—think about the economies of scale if your vision were deployed throughout an entire city. For example, your vision could be a transportation stop for an entirely new kind of public transit (as that implies there are many other stops throughout your city).

Constraints, Important Dates, and Selection Criteria

Selected RFP Grantees will receive $1000 plus a modest travel stipend not to exceed $300. Your space will be indoors, and setup must take fewer than 2 hours. The dimensions of available spaces vary, but limit yourself to roughly 8’ x 8’. You are guaranteed a power source.

Projects that adhere to the descriptions and details above will be given preference by judges for selection. RFPs must be submitted by midnight PST on August 27. Projects will be selected by September 3. Up to two top projects will also be selected for public presentation at IFTF’s headquarters in Palo Alto after the conference, with an additional prize granted of $500. These pieces will be housed for the foreseeable future in IFTF’s gallery space.

About the Organizers

About IFTF

Institute for the Future is an independent, non-profit research organization with a 46-year track record of helping all kinds of organizations make the futures they want. IFTF’s core research staff and creative design studio work together to provide practical foresight for a world undergoing rapid change. The Open City/ Art City Festival is IFTF’s first large-scale public event dedicated to celebrating our shared future and the possibilities we can create together. 

About YBCA

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts was founded in 1993 out of an expressed need for an accessible, high-profile San Francisco venue devoted to contemporary visual art, performance, and film/video representing diverse cultural and artistic perspectives. Distinguished by its support for contemporary artists from around the world, YBCA is also recognized for the important role the organization plays in the San Francisco Bay Area arts ecology and in the community at large.

YBCA serves as a catalyst for local and regional artistic activity. From its award-winning youth arts and activism job training program, Young Artists at Work, to the acclaimed triennial Bay Area Now multidisciplinary arts festival, YBCA has established its leadership role as a champion of living artists working in the Bay Area. YBCA also maintains an active community partnership program that makes performance spaces available for rent to a wide spectrum of Bay Area performing arts organizations.