Chat Café

What’s a ‘Chat Café’?

Any arranged informal pop-up / drop-in / logged-in event where we can chat together over a coffee.

Flyer design (above) by Grant to promote Friday drop-in *’Chat Cafés’ at the MAC Centre, Birmingham, UK. (1993 to 1996)

To view more Grant design projects, visit Projects and Ideas

Chat Café FAQ’s

How could I benefit?
By bringing your thoughts from isolation and into a Chat Café you may clarify your projects’ aims, evolve workable ideas and establish useful people-links – all over an informal cuppa.

What aspects can we discuss?
All chats must be people and project based.

What do I need to bring?
Your project questions.

What’s the principle behind Chat Café and the Penny University?
Chat Cafés promote the principles of the original Penny University and provide a setting where ideas can be shared and built upon. By getting people to think and work together, most projects bear fruit.

What does it cost?
Following on from the tradition of the Penny University of the 1700s, you can still get in for 1p

How long has it been going?
It was started in 1993 by two members of BEAF (Business, Education & Arts Forum) during their annual meeting at the International Convention Centre, Birmingham,UK.

Are Chat Cafés now international?
They can be on Zoom or Skype – so long as you make your own coffee.

Posted by Grant.

#penny, cafe, chat, coffee, room, university

Shell Museum of Design & Decomposition

Projects and IdeasGrantJ

Plans are underway to re-form the World’s only Shell Museum of Design and Decomposition, first open to the public in 1978 at Aber Gwen Mill, Pencader, Wales.

For over Five Hundred Million Years, Nature’s design on Earth was one of Permacycle – gathering in the energy from the Sun to feed and evolve life. Although we are one of the results of that long history, we have gone against its grain by inventing un-natural pollutants and very hard to recycle materials.

As we become more and more aware of the many problems we create for the Natural World, and ourselves, we look more closely at how Nature kept balance in our absence to see if we can learn how to help Nature recover and in turn, extend our life on Earth. There is nothing to say we will achieve this but there’s every possibility that we might.

The Shell Museum of Design and Decomposition displays working examples of Nature’s Permacycle alongside Nature’s wonders of design through evolution.

We’re always looking to collaborate with those who are working to secure a perpetual future.