In London's Trafalgar Square, four lions sit at the base of Nelson's Column. But starting today, there will be a fifth. Google Arts & Culture and designer Es Devlin have created a public sculpture for the London Design Festival. It's a lion that over the course of the festival will generate a collective poem by using input from the public and artificial intelligence. The neural network running the installation was trained on 25 million words of 19th century poetry and when passersby "feed" the lion a word via a Pixelbook, the lion will generate a line of original poetry.

September is fast approaching and so is London Design Festival and the Digital Design Weekend! Now in its sixth year, the Digital Design Weekend will bring together again over a hundred artists, designers, engineers, technologists and of course the public to celebrate and share contemporary digital art and design, take part in interactive installations and labs, engage in conversations, and learn about processes. Over the weekend we will be taking over the Museum to showcase a huge programme of cutting edge, international digital projects, but also performances, talks, open workshops, labs and family-friendly activities, all exploring engineering, making and collaboration. The Weekend will include many protoyping events and workshops, such as the Open IoT Design Sprint with Mozilla Open IoT Studio & collaborators* to make & share prototypes that serve local communities & celebrate the unique affordances of physical places; a Biosynth workshop to introduce basic electronics and biology interactions by Andreas Siagian from Indonesia's Lifepatch; a Storm Laboratory with Loop.ph to experience the turbulent nature of geophysical air dynamics, as well as a hydroponic system workshop, a co-design performance workshop and many more. There is lots for young people and families to enjoy, including, a Build Your Own Pavilion Young Architects Challenge by the Serpentine Galleries and Kidesign challenging budding young architects to design the pavilions of the future; Scan the World by MyMiniFactory, inviting families to help scan the V&A's collections and see 3D printers in action; a Tanglebot workshop with unruly robots, wool, Lego and Raspberry PIs, as well as many family-friendly installations and other activities.