Mending, making & manufacture: can we redesign the sock?
In a VoxPop for Design week last week I proposed making a spectacle of myself on the Fourth Plinth by running up samples on my sewing machine in full view of the public; and to their benefit, since I propsoed giving away the fruits of my labour. My stated reason was that we have become distanced from production; our competence to invent or improvise solutions to the practical problems that beset us is diminished in proportion to the increasing quantity of solutions we buy. Jonathan Glancey wrote stirringly about this growing incompetence to make in the Guardian last summer.
I’ve commissioned an essay for the RSA about the renewed interest in making and manufacturing after a period when business and policy have tended to concentrate on knowledge and services. I’m asking for a fresh account of why we stopped making things (if we did stop); what the benefits of making things are; and how making things might become easier. What conditions would foster small, local, manufacturing entrepreneurship? And what are the implications for improvisation and innovation among ordinary citizens who, while they may be making to save money or resources, are not making to make money?
Our understanding of services became rich and metaphysical as the last century turned and the internet came to define so much of business. But Mark Adams, Director of Vitsoe and one of Britain’s most resolute and articulate design-led manufacturers, reminded me that products and services are not an either/or. In a new dawn of manufacturing, on a planet where sense tells us to make and buy for longevity, and in a society with today’s level of personal expectation and individualism, goods and services are critically interdependent.
The service aspect of goods brings us to repair. An obvious symptom of our remoteness from making is our disinclination to repair. In gathering an interest group around making, manufacturing and repair I discovered that my Dutch friends at Premsela are involved with Platform.21 in a Repair project in full swing. In true Dutch style, it emphasises the surprising beauty and surreality of repaired objects; hybrids of style and substance; relocations of meaning and memory; repair as a creative project under artistic direction. Our RSA repair project will be less self-expression and more self-reliance.
Among my own repairs, I confess to darning socks. There’s a design problem: while manufacturers frequently advertise a “reinforced heel”, they don’t address the real stress point which is not the heel but the tendon area above the heel where the edge of your shoe wears the yarn away.
Teach me what to ask for: literacy, numeracy, design!
We went down to Cornwall last week to meet a number of people. The prompt was the Design Council’s next public engagement exercise, Dott Cornwall, which shares the spirit our own hypothesis: that if you give people design, they become more self-reliant.
From the charming and multifarious Director Robert O’Dowd we learned that two of the projects in the offing are a new community centre for the deprived Pengegon Estate and a new road between Camborne, Poole and Redruth. Now in the extreme interpretation of our hypothesis, the insights and processes of design would lead the residents of this estate and these towns to raise their own community centre, Amish-style, and build their own road like Romans in Britain. Naturally I’m very intersted in what the feasible version will be and expect t Dott to prevail steadfastly in “realising” the idea of user-involvment in design, as it did in the North East in 2007, furnishing the rest of us with exemplars.
Phil Gendall, a Falmouth designer whom we also had the pleasure of meeting at his harbourside studio, put the potential legacy in realistic terms in an interveiw for Design Week: “If some kids do a little better in school and graduate with a better understanding of design, then go on to run local businesses and commisison design in a better way, that would be a far better outcome than just bricks and mortar”. This is to say that design teaches you what to ask for; not a bad analogy and certainly the principle that drives the Sorrell Foundation’s JoinedUpDesignForSchools.
Moving on to schools, we also made a visit to the very impressive Design & Making Centre at Redruth, which under the leadership of David Prest has for twenty years rigorously defined the fundamental meaning and value of designing and making and developed fantastically practical resources for classrooms nationwide. The DMC’s emphasises many things in its rationale; I especially respond to design’s cross-curricular potential, the confidence design gives people in addressing practical challenges and the way design encourages critical awareness about all aspects of our environment. All of this points to design being a high civic skill and makes a closer alliance between Design & Society and the RSA’s Education project imperative. Literacy, Numeracy, Design!
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Current RSA Events- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - State of Emergency October 20, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Reporting Live From The End of the World October 15, 2010
- The Flaw October 11, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Dispatches from the Dark Side -The Death Of Justice October 8, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay October 7, 2010