Further thoughts on social furniture

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.

Matthew Crawford again

(p164, Shop Class as Soulcraft)

Idea links

 

 Matthew Crawford, p161, Shop Class as Soulcraft 

- knowing how; personal skill, practised, tacit understanding

- knowing that; information spouted from anyone, anywhere

George Sturt, as discussed by C. Fraying, p35, On Craftsmanship

Jerome Ravetz, as discussed by C. Frayling, p46, On Craftsmanship

Robert Ornstein, as discussed by C. Frayling, p70, On Craftsmanship

Slow Design Framework video

Slow Design STEER theory from bridget harvey on Vimeo.

A bit of thinking

One arrangement of the thoughts I was having after re-reading parts of Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft (otherwise known as The Case for Working with your Hands), a bit more David Pye and listening to Richard Sennett and David Gauntlett on the radio yesterday.  I have arranged this in a variety of ways - flickr link to come - and this is by no means the end of my post-it notes and ideas on the subject, but for me at the moment the main questions are as follows:

Are modern methods of sharing (you tube tutorials etc) any less valid than traditional master/apprenticeship tutorials?

Is physical making more valid than out souring ones making, and just having the idea or concept yourself?

By valid I mean does it hold less value (emotional, financial, experiential)?

There are obviously things that one cannot get from videos or online picture tutorials, similarly to learning from a book, that you do get with a master teacher, learning directly from an expert, but is that due to the lack of skill with which we use the resources (could we make our video tutorials more detailed for example) (idea discussed by Richard Sennett on R4 show, Thinking Allowed)

Is an idea or concept any less of a made thing than a physical object?  Does the skill of the outsourced maker lie in not adding their own personality to the object they have been asked to make?

Many many questions sparked off by these heard conversations and read ideas.   More to follow on this.

Embellishing possibilities, is it co-design?

A question:  If you add something , embellish or mend a garment that already exists are you collaborating with the maker?  is it collaboration or is it one step removed?

Mike Press

Mike Press is speaking at Chelsea today, 2pm in the Lecture theatre at John Islip Street.  He is talking on Hand-made Knowledge, its open entry and free...come along!!

http://mikepress.wordpress.com/   

check him out!

David Pye

Reading this book (written 1968) has truely got my brain going.  This is a primary list of questions/thoughts it has inspired in me, and quotes from it:

'On the workman's depends a great part of the quality of our environment' (p17)
'It may be mentioned in passing that in workmanship the care counts for more than the judgement and dexterity; though care may well become habitual and unconscious.' (p20)

If risk is only in the workmans hand, does the making of a (successful) machine lead from stored risk to stored success and deflated/depleted risk?
'"Is the result predetermined and unalterable once production begins?"'(p22)
Can risk lead to the creation of certainty?

'The workmanship of risk has no exclusive perogative of quality.  What it has exclusively is an immensely various range of qualities, without which at its command the art of design becomes arid and impoverished.'(p23)
Is this still relevant?  I believe it is, however I also believe the quality of mechanical production has improved sine the advent of computerisation.

And once again, the tool as an extension of the hand crops up (p28) - when making, are we, the makers, part of the machinery?  Do we become the tool?

David Pye

Am currently reading this book and thoroughly enjoying it.  David Pye was a great thinker.  His best known idea was about the workmanship of risk - where one slip of the human hand making the object could ruin or change the outcome of the whole piece - and the workmanship of certainty, mechanised mass production, where a machine churns out many identical and well made copies of one object.