Makers and Dreamers

Makers and Dreamers: Building a Borough Brain

In the AR/VR Lab at the Royal Docks Centre for Sustainability, the Makers and Dreamers exhibition brings together the Makers Club, UEL students, and the Negotiating AI as a Community (NAIC) Borough Brain project team.

Together they are experimenting with something unusual: a community-trained AI.

Instead of relying entirely on large tech companies, the team is exploring how a local Large Language Model (LLM) — a self-hosted AI system — could be developed to support community knowledge, creativity, and collaboration.

Come and meet the team, learn how local AI systems work, and talk to the AI they are beginning to train.

The exhibition is called Makers and Dreamers because it combines two essential things:

• Making — learning how to build and understand new technologies
• Dreaming — imagining how these tools could strengthen communities and help people connect, learn, and create together

At its heart is a simple but powerful question:

Can AI be built with, for, and by communities of citizens — rather than only by corporations for markets of consumers?