Take Me Make Me Workshop

Last Saturday JMB Collective were at Camberwell Open House.  We were giving out Take Me Make Me boxes - a kit of stuff to make with and asking people to have a go at making something from the ingredients in the kit.  Some of the results are pictured here!  Each kit had a different set of familiar objects in it, we hoped it would inspire people to look differently at the objects surrounding them at home, and what their potential could be.
We had a lot of interest and gave out 60 kits (thank you if you were one of those who took part) and got some great feedback from our visitors. 

Kit preparation

Social Furniture

Last week I took part in a workshop centered around ideas of social furniture.  The aim was as follows:
To design a social furniture that creates a sense of community around it, not just physically but
mentally through a process of creation.

There was a very interesting set of participants including product designers, stylists and artists. 

 This piece started out with a bunch of us wearing one sleeve of a shirt, with our other sleeve tied to another participants empty sleeve.  It ended up being a large ping pong bat, with an orange being bounced from shirt to shirt.

This was an experiment in tension and coordination.  A piece of blue plastic canvas was pegged around 4 participants and created a series of pockets for containing and carrying goods.  It also provided a surprising amount of strength - the participants found they could all lean back simultaneously and it would hold their weights.

For lunch we ate and talked in a Food Communication Lab hosted by Natasha Rosling.

The afternoon ended up with a discussion of ideas that had come from the mornings experiments, some of which are documented below.

Mend*rs Symposium

See the JMB blog  and Mend*rs for more details

On the weekend of 29 June to 1st July I am attending the inaugural Mend*rs Symposium near Kendal in Cumbria.  This is a weekend of events, workshops and talks centered around the notion of mending, what it means to be a mender and how we can mend and encourage others to do so too.

We are running an event called The D.I.Y. Store.  Inside the D.I.Y. Store you will be able to mend and re-purpose objects, which you can either bring yourself, purchase through an exchange system where payment consists of mending materials or objects, skills or ideas or something else entirely - we are open to barters, offers and swaps!

We intend this to be a participative and collaborative exercise, conversational and open.  We will be logging mended items, materials given and everything else on twitter using the hash tag #mendrssymposium (note the missing e in mendrs) and in a physical log book which I will post about after the event.

Also going to be there:

Tom Of Holland

Kate Fletcher

James Wallbank

and more, see here for full details, here for facebook and here for twitter

I am interested in mending on many levels, not least because I work with recycled and recyclable materials.  I often mend and was taught to darn, re-knit and patch my clothes (and other textiles) a child, also to patch furniture and other possessions.  I often renew rather than replace my belongings and frequently find very new things quite odd.  The saying 'every piece of furniture should tell a story' is something that sticks with me, I like the biography and history that knocks, breaks and mends offer objects.  I believe that mending can help you understand the world around you and the objects we own in new ways, by investigating the inner workings of broken things rather than discarding them we put some importance on that object.  Indeed by hacking objects, repurposing or even mending with unexpected materials we can offer a new understanding and a new identity, possibly a new sense of thingness, rather than a new piece of land fill.

Tom Price