Manchester Science Festival 2022 featured world premieres, inspiring experiences and entertaining events delivered on site at the museum and in venues across the city, all looking to answer the question: what does the future hold for humanity?
Inspired to find out more? We have gathered the resources below for you to delve deeper into the festival theme.
Sustainable living
Sustainability was a key topic of the festival—from the food we eat to the clothes we wear. As part of our museum collection, we also explore sustainability in our Textiles Gallery. Find out more about the history of sustainability and the objects on display in the museum here:
In these two blog posts, festival partners Sow the City discuss sustainable food shopping and how we are looking to fungus to create sustainable materials.
STC blog posts
If you've been inspired by the possibilities of food, why not have a go at creating your own spooky sustainable recipes for Halloween?
Future tech
So, what does the future hold for humanity? From digital assistants and our future love life, to beat-boxing robots and cutting-edge computing, we dived into the possibilities of futuristic technology.
Festival partners NOVARS at the University of Manchester explored the future of sound through beatboxing AI and pioneering software, as well as imagining the soundscapes of exoplanets—planets outside of the solar system.
Computing is advancing at a rapid rate but to look to our future, we have to learn from the past. Our replica of 'Baby'—the first computer to run and store a program—is on display in the Revolution Manchester Gallery, representing a significant time in computing history and pioneering developments in creating memory and computer systems.
Looking to the future, on display for the first time at Manchester Science Festival was part of the world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer. The Spiking Neural Network Architecture, or 'SpiNNaker', has been built to work in the same way as a human brain, and can send billions of bits of data to thousands of destinations at the same time.
Find out more about SpiNNaker here:
Explore early computing with our Jaqcuard loom, on display in the Textiles Gallery. A marriage of textile production and computing, the Jacquard loom uses punch cards to store a weaving pattern, which can then be replicated many times.
As the future of technology develops at a rapid rate, we also looked into our personal thoughts and responses to everyday technology such as digital assistants and how much we do—or don't—trust them, and why. Find out more about this fascinating project and the results of our public survey here:
If you want to continue your exploration of scientific discoveries and ideas that changed, and are changing, the world, here’s a guide to what's on display in our Revolution Manchester Gallery.
