A layered view of Swansea Bay: a ruined stone castle and dense summer planting to the left, a crow on the shore, a slender tower and a small red-sailed boat on the water, a working dock, a bridge and a civic building beneath wind turbines, and a breaking wave beside a pale sphere and an oxide disc in the foreground.

Futurist studio / Abertawe

Building afuture ownedby everyone

01 / What is HAEN?

HAEN helps communities understand, build and govern technology on their own terms.

A futurist studio in Abertawe, bringing technical knowledge into conversation with culture, community life and the environment.

Everyday life depends on systems most people cannot see, inspect or influence. We work in the space between accepting every centralised service and refusing technology altogether: what belongs elsewhere, what should stay close, and what a community could reasonably own.

Technical knowledge is welcome here. It is not a condition of entry.

02 / Three connected motions

Convene

Talks and public meetings on technology, decentralisation and the environment.

A long timber and stone gathering table among varied seats, translucent planes and fine intersecting lines.

Publish

Collecting voices and putting them into formats people can read and pass on. Everything is open source and free to reproduce.

Layered deckled papers, translucent sheets, charcoal transfer textures and a narrow oxide edge.

Build

Local servers, networks and archives. And showing people how to build their own.

A modest community home-lab with an open network rack, monitor, visible cables, repair tools, reused shelving and houseplants.

03 / Pam Abertawe

Why begin here?

Technological futures are usually designed somewhere else.

They arrive from institutions with little knowledge of the places their systems land in. Cymru should not be treated only as a market, a source of data, or a landscape to put infrastructure on.

Abertawe was formed by industry, migration, coastline, culture and changing relationships with power. Beginning here gives abstract questions a location. Who holds a community archive? What should still work when the connection fails? What would Welsh-language infrastructure actually require?

Language carries ways of describing and organising the world, so Welsh belongs inside a technological future from the start rather than as decoration added afterwards. Working in one place is not a limit. The questions are shared by many.

04 / Current experiment

Node 01

A proposed proof-of-concept community server.

Node 01 will make local digital infrastructure visible: its components, connections, costs, energy use, failures and limits. Its functions remain proposals to test with communities, not operational claims.

Read the working idea

A provisional community workroom with a visible server rack, local media monitor, repair bench, publications, plants and exposed network routes.

05 / An open question

Who owns
the future?

Learn what HAEN is becoming hello@haen.cymru