The Foundry & Institute of Coding

The Foundry Studios

The Foundry is the successor of the FET enterprise studios like Impulse and was financed through the Institute of Coding (IOC), "a £20million, government funded, national consortium of educators, employers and outreach organisations that is co-developing new courses to help a larger and more diverse group of learners into digital careers".

The Foundry made a significant contribution to the development, research, literature and delivery of the IOC's mission in particular though a Work Packages on Innovative Spaces (WP1.6) and Extra Curricular Innovation (WP1.5). For UWE Bristol the funding allowed a team of academics led by Dr Andy King and myself, to address core challenges found during the studio pilots:

  • Institutional service structures (like IT Support, Human Resources etc.) were slow to engage with agile needs of this new type of business engagement - with the current workflows presenting many inefficiencies.
  • Studios projects were still siloed within disciplines and interdisciplinary collaboration was rare.
  • Project work relied heavily on surplus space not timetabled for teaching and the separation between curriculum and professional work was blurred.
  • Individual studio brands did not effectively communicate a unified movement cutting across UWE students and staff to external businesses and partners.
  • The studio model had not spread beyond the Faculty of Environment and Technology.

To address these challenges we would create a new "affinity space" which challenges the identity of conventional learning environments for student, academic and industry stakeholders to meet, work and develop outside of normal teaching labs. Alongside the creation of a new space, the IOC would fund trial support roles, scaling of tech events such as game jams and hackathons, and pursue the formalising of methods for engaging different stakeholders. The development of the space in relation to game jams was the topic of Dr Andy King's successful doctoral thesis. He has since moved on from UWE to a deanship of XJTLU Campus, China.

During the Institute of Coding project, the Foundry build was funded to completion, and made available to students and communities who engaged with paid technology projects or participative technology events. During this time, the Foundry adopted the aim of widening participation in coding and digital skills.

In the period between being opened by the universities minister in 2019, until the end of the IOC funding in 2021, the Foundry engaged 678 learners, jammers and hackers and 121 digital products were developed. Leading up to the COVID pandemic, the Foundry initiative saw continued growth, being nominated for a THE award, and become one of the top three live coding event “jam” sites in the UK.

Since the end of the IOC period the Foundry has gone on to deliver a complete suite of skills bootcamps with the DETI group, continued to hold large scale tech events, and supply authentic paid projects to students with industry stakeholders. The final observations of the Foundry Studios report (below) went on to influence the creation of a new interdisciplinary, student focused, creative technology intiative, The Beacon Commissions and Prevail Festival.

Institute of Coding - WP1.5.2

During the IOC and Foundry projects I led the UWE deliverable for Extra Curricular Innovation. This work would look to diversify the student audiences the studios would engage through technology skills events, create insights into how and why students engage with the studio, demonstrate a range of stakeholder led projects across disciplines, and share best practices from formalising the methods of the studio operations, such as payments, contracts, IP, etc.

You can read my full report published by the IOC Observatory below.