Over the course of a full week, Foy’s Arcade was transformed into an amazing interactive educational event hub, for narrm ngarrgu | Melbourne Knowledge Week, in a new partnership with ISPT. We are so privileged to be a part of MKW this year, sharing knowledge, exploring new ways of thinking and experiencing new innovations through the many exhibitions, workshops and panel discussions held at Foy’s Arcade.
In collaboration with the team at ISPT and MKW we prepared a program of Exhibitions that ran throughout the week, as well as four panel events which delved into issues around technology, sustainability and humanity.
Our highlight event was “A Bug’s (After)Life” Panel with Phoebe Gardner (co-founder of Bardee) and Rob Gell (Executive Director at Rethink Sustainability) sharing their knowledge, with Renee Nutbean (ESG Innovation Lead at ISPT) moderating the discussion.
We learned about the absolute importance of becoming a carbon positive society and how our experts are making headway on many sustainability goals in their own fields. Phoebe gave us a granular look at her startup – Bardee – showing us how she plans to reshape the global food system through scaling up and reducing the problem of food waste. Rob took us through the bigger picture, explaining the global issues we need to tackle if we want to sustain a bright future for our children.
Following our panels our “A Bug’s (After)Life” Exhibition was open to the public, hundreds of people came through and watch the story of Bardee and ISPT working together to reduce food waste in Victoria, adding up to about 570 Tonnes of CO2 emission offset. Visitors could interact and play with Bardee’s insect life-cycle and read about what products can be made and the nutritional value for pets, plants and eventually, humans too!
Another exhibition that was run concurrently at Foy’s was the “Nanobiosensing society” – a gesture controlled experience showing cancer cells with nano-particles attached to them, the visitor could zoom in and out, looking at the potential for targeted treatment at the cellular level.
Another evening panel event was “Screening tomorrow” run by Deakin. This discussion looked at a theoretical future of screens, film, technology and entertainment all the way up to 100 years into the future. This also evolved into a discussion about the future of virtual ethics and morality in digital worlds.
Red Cross (Humanitech) also had two Panel events – “A Humanity-first approach to technology” – where we talked about prioritising designing technology in a way that benefits those who need it most, how humanity should be the foundation to the design, analysis, development and governance of frontier technologies, illuminating the latest insights and research. This was followed by “Frontier technology for social impact” – a provoking panel discussion on how frontier technologies are being used to tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity.
All our visitors received a gift bag with a seed card in it containing vative flowers and some other lollies and goodies. For those lucky enough to attend our premiere “A Bug’s (After)Life” Panel, Bardee gifted a beautiful bag of plant super fertiliser made from their black soldier fly larvae.
We are so privileged to have been apart of this years MKW program and can’t wait to see and learn more next year!