Bath Digital Festival

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BSU becomes key sponsor of Bath’s Digital Festival

Bath Spa University is a key sponsor of a three-day Digital Festival in Bath, showcasing the diversity and talent of BSU’s professional creatives and the wider South-West region.  

TechSPARK’s Digital Festival kicks off Tuesday 14 May and continues until Thursday 16 May. Free to attend, the festival boasts a jam-packed programme of carefully curated events, speakers, and accessible locations in Bath’s buzzing city centre.

Aligning itself with the University’s ethos, the dynamic nonprofit seeks to spark new ideas and is driven by the firm belief that collaboration beats competition. TechSPARK connects and supports innovators in the southwest region, upskilling the local community from the backroom to the boardroom.

This year, the Bath Digital Festival is all about celebrating creative innovation. Delivered over three days and three themes, the festival offers a diverse range of selected topics, explored both figuratively and literally: Sport, Space and Cities. 

Looking to change perceptions of the city, the festival will explore how Bath’s past has shaped its present. Famed for its architecture and celebrated for its deep roots in Roman and Georgian history, Bath is often noted purely for its cultural heritage. This year, techSPARKS’s Managing Director Ben Shorrock has urged festival goers to look beyond this to find out what else the city has to offer.  

Discussing his hopes for the festival, Ben said:  

“Bath has an incredible and well-deserved cultural heritage. But peel back the Georgian Regency and you’ll find that there is actually so much more to the city than you likely ever realised. The 2024 Bath Digital Festival will explore how we can tap into the challenger mindset of the city’s cutting-edge businesses to build a better tomorrow.” 

Bath Spa University and The Studio are proud to present events across the festival, including talks by university staff, Studio and EMERGE residents, and showcases.  

The Studio 

The Studio's resident micro businesses are showcasing innovative uses for immersive tech, sharing ground-breaking work from the creative tech sector at three showcases.  

The Sport and Life Sciences Showcase offers a fascinating glimpse into how technology is transforming sports, from performance analytics to fan engagement and beyond. Attendees can discover the latest in wearable tech, virtual training environments, and smart equipment. 

The Cities Showcase invites the public to The Studio to meet their residents, find out more about their community and wider digital projects and play with their studio kit. Creative Technologist Naomi Smyth will be facilitating a 'stay and play' session to enable the local tech community to find out more about the immersive tech available at The Studio for research development. 

The Space Showcase explores ‘space’ as both the final frontier above us and the interactive world around us, engaging in hands-on projects that aim to make technology a more integral and intuitive part of our daily lives. 

Bath Spa University 

BSU students are demonstrating three months of hard work and innovation at the Bath Digital Festival '24 - Cities Showcase. Led by the University’s Creative Computing Team, Creative Computing, Computing, Creative Media and Humanities, students across two year groups will showcase their work around digital heritage prototypes at the Studio in Bath. The event offers students the unique opportunity to present their work and gain valuable insights as they grow into professional digital creatives.   

Bath Spa University has partnered with techSPARK to bring you a session designed to “foster connections, share insights, and strengthen our community spirit” by intertwining the rich resources of Bath’s two universities and listening to the strong voices of the local community in a session about driving positive change.    

Nigel Fryatt, resident at The Studio, mentor at EMERGE and a regular guest and associate lecturer at BSU, brings you a workshop that will “collaboratively envision the future of Bath, utilising playful and democratic decision-making techniques inspired by those used in the tech sector” where participants work together to identify areas of Bath that are thriving and those that are not.    

The lineup also includes a workshop for BSU students to develop their ideas for a startup, providing the essential framework to evolve their business propositions from concept to reality.  

You can browse all the events happening at Bath Digital Festival 2024 and register your place on the techSPARK website.