Remake it Clothes

My work is in this exciting new Thames and Hudson book by Henrietta Thompson and Neal Whittington.  If you missed the other title that goes with this you can see it here: Remake it Home.

There are loads of exciting makers featured in it and some great ideas.

buy it here

Art House Coop Sketchbook Project

   

Here is the sketch book that I completed for the 2012 Art House Coop Sketchbook Project.  You can view the digitised version of it here, along with all the other participants.  The tour of the sketchbooks comes to London on October 12th - 19th in Canada Water Library - details here.  After the tour ends it will be archived in the Brooklyn Art Library where anyone can visit and take a look. 

I stitched through my book so it cannot be opened or used in any traditional way.  I wanted to take away part of its use to open a discussion about how we use books. 

OPen Design Now is Open!

You can read this book as it 'opens' online here....

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.

Sustainism

An article from Design Observer:

Like the Word or Not, the Era of "Sustainism" Is Here

Interesting, although I am not sure that I like it or their thinking behind it.  I will have to think about it more!