Tommy Newbold
BDes (Hons) Product Design
Waters of Leith
Waters of Leith explores how public imagination can support climate adaptation in Leith. Through workshops, storytelling and speculative encounters, the project gathered local hopes, concerns and lived knowledge about flooding and future change.
These public imaginings became Helping Hands: interactive sculptures that invite people to listen, hold and share stories from possible futures. By turning community insight into visible public waymarkers, the project asks how imagination might grow into civic action, shared ownership and new structures for change.
Brian Young, electrician from 2185, speaks through a Helping Hand on The Shore, turning touch into a future encounter.
Installing Helping Hands along The Shore, placing imagined futures back into the streets that shaped them.
Construction details: aluminium powder, polyurethane cast hands, PETG enclosures and 3D-printed parts.
Inside the open-source Helping Hand: ESP32 control, LiPo battery, solar power and a 3D-printed PCB.
Hand casting experiments, failures and material tests, from fragile plaster to cold-cast bronze and iron.
A close-up of the 3D-printed PCB, designed to make the electronics easier to build and reproduce.
A workshop in a Leith pub, using storytelling and shared imagination to uncover ideas for future civic action.
Floating allotments on the Water of Leith: a workshop idea visualised as a possible future for local food growing.
Flooded tramlines in Leith, turning a workshop imagining into a rendered glimpse of an adapted future.