A fortnight ago we held our inaugural ‘Email Party’ at the Old Library in Digbeth. Thirty children from Hawthorne School, were on hand to introduce senior citizens to the internet and email on Tuesday 20th July.
This was a key pit stop on a journey that began over six months ago when Laura and I conceived of a project called First Email, as part of the Hello Digital Participatory programme. In conjunction with artist Kate Rowles, Patrick Lacey (from the design agency Abake), Bright Space and the two schools we’ve be working with long-term Hawthorne and Kingsthorne.
Inspired by a scene in a show at the Edinburgh Festival in which an artist shows a still of the first email her father ever sent (a short sweet message to her from a local library) we wanted to develop a project that could delve deeper into this poetic first encounter with technology at an advanced age.
Over the next couple of months we’ll be developing a dedicated site that will archive the first emails of senior citizens from around the country. We hope some of these emails will form the basis of posters that will pop up around October. In the meantime keep an eye out for invitations to get involved by either bringing a friend to a future email party, or giving a lesson to someone you know who might be curious.