Imperial Festival: Open for ideas

From today, Imperial staff and students can submit ideas to exhibit or perform in the 2017 Imperial Festival.

Imperial Festival is the College’s flagship annual event celebrating the best science, engineering and creativity from Imperial. With hundreds of attractions, demonstrations, interactive exhibits, talks, tours, workshops and performances put on by more than 500 exhibitors from our academic and student community, the 2016 festival attracted 15,000 visitors to the College.

To mark the opening of proposals the Festival team have also unveiled video case studies highlighting two exhibits from lasy year’s Festival – Sensorium, and the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering’s Search and Rescue citizen science stand  –which were particularly popular with the public and showed great creative thinking on behalf of the academic researchers and students behind them.

Watch the highlights video from last year’s festival, which asked attendees what they thought of the experience of attending the Festival as a whole:

Imperial Festival 2017: 6-7 May

With planning underway for the 2017 festival, which will take place across the weekend of the 6 and 7 May, the organising team have today opened up applications for those interested in putting forward an idea for next year.

“The Festival provides a unique opportunity for the College to open its doors and share the wonder of our research with the public,” says Professor Maggie Dallman, the academic lead on the College's Societal Engagement Strategy.

“A key pillar of both the College’s commitment to sharing the wonder, and our newly launched Societal Engagement Framework, these two days in May provide researchers with an opportunity to take on board the views of others and thereby adapt the path of their research to achieve a greater impact. Last year our academic and student community broke records with over 100 proposals submitted to our organisers. The quality of Festival content impresses us enormously every year, surpassing the previous year’s offering to the public so we can’t wait to see what people come up with this year.”

How to apply

The online application form is there for anyone from the College to use to submit their ideas. For the first time, it has been opened up to include suggestions for performances for the dance and music tent, as well as the traditional research demonstrations that make up the main research marquee and other zones.

“We believe that Imperial Festival is a great opportunity to show the public that we are not just Imperial scientists, engineers, clinicians, students or professional members of staff, but also a hugely creative community that includes talented artists and performers,” says Imperial Festival Manager Katie Weeks.

To aid those interesting in submitting an idea for the 2017 Festival, the Festival team has provided some suggestions for the sort of contributions we encourage for the 2017 Festival, which can be found on the Festival home page.

“We always listen to our festival visitors to find out what they most enjoyed and what they would like to see more of in order to make next year’s Festival even better,“ says Ms Weeks. “Whilst we are not expecting each stand to include all of the elements we have outlined, and we understand that some really great ideas might not be able to include any, we recommend everyone to at least consider ways to incorporate these into your ideas.”

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Visit the application page to submit your proposal. The deadline for submitted your ideas is mid-day on Monday 6 February 2017. If you have any questions or would like to discuss your ideas with the organisers, you can contact them on festival@imperial.ac.uk.