Snapshots of Vienna

I've been lucky enough to do some travelling this year with my new role at Impact Hub Birmingham, descending on Vienna in a sleepy heap earlier this summer to participate in their #1001hackathon to explore how storytelling can create social impact. Exploring the city on foot between sessions at the beautiful Impact Hub Vienna, I was delighted by how much creativity was felt in the city, alongside impressive sites of tradition and new growth.

L-R:
1. Vegan eis at Eis-Greissler, Rotenturmstraß
2. MUMOK - Museum Moderner Kunst Wien
3. #1001hackathon, Impact Hub Vienna
4. Street drawing, Neubau
5. Wiener Riesenrad, Riesenradplatz
6. Tulips, Prater

In contrast to the beautiful blooms and gentle coffee culture, the hackathon itself was intense and challenging, with just 48 hours to run a creative campaign to tell the story of different social ventures coming out of the hub's scaling programme. It was a privilege to work alongside young creative minds from across Europe and beyond, and I learnt a lot about how to work without the set-up or detailed conceptual process that I'm used to, such as photographing and editing sketches without my friendly neighbourhood scanner. My focus was to showcase the importance of a community resource for customers of green energy company aWATTar, which resulted in 'say watt?', a feature that the founders decided to take forward to build a people-led movement around green power.

A fast-paced and largely draining trip with new friends, approaches and a lot of beer, I left Vienna with a feeling of having grown, perhaps mostly in confidence in my own abilities, having had them put suitably to the test. However, this felt like the first chapter in my road to discovering what makes a good story, and what role the arts can play in Impact Hubs across the world, something I look forward to diving more deeply into moving forward.