Slow Summit event

The fourth event in the 2011 TFRC Open Lecture series, run in conjunction with Craftspace, is the Slow Summit, on July 8th with Prof. Alastair Fuad-Luke and Prof. Helen Carnac.

The event is co-curated by Becky Earley and Helen Carnac, and is an Open Lecture followed by an invitation-only workshop session. The event examines the emergence of the Slow Movement, within a context of design, making and art practice. The two guest speakers will map out the ground that this new creative thinking occupies, both addressing the theory and the practice, as well as the local/global economics and politics that fuel the movement.

Prof. Alastair Fuad-Luke is a renowned sustainable design theorist and writer and author of Design Activism, the Eco Design Handbooks and newly appointed Professor at Aalto University, Helsinki.

Prof. Helen Carnac is a maker, writer and curator of Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution, an touring exhibition from Craftspace.

The Open Lectures will be at 272 High Holborn, Lecture Theater, 10:30am - 1pm.

Creative Transition launches

Last week saw the launch of a small research project we are involved in called Creative Transition that brings together staff and students across CCW (Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon) who are interested in notions of sustainability and resilience in art and design education.

The event was called 'The Keys are Under the Mat', and it was a day of presentations and discussions between staff and post-graduate students from across the three colleges. The first speaker Ian was from Transition Heathrow, an activist group based in the communities around the proposed runway expansion at Heathrow. Ian described the activity that the Transition group have been involved in and introduced us to the ideas and tools that have been developed by the Transition Towns network.

Andy Merritt from the Farm Shop then spoke about the urban food growing project set up in an empty shop in Dalston, by collective Something & Sons. They are exploring hydroponics, aquaponics and soil based growing and they are a great example of a collective approach to trying out new ways to sustainable urban living.

We have spent some time debating the terms sustainability and resilience amongst the group. The term resilience has been widely used lately, from designers to economists to politicians, and there are many definitions and insights about what it means. Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Town movements has written an article here on resilience thinking and there is even a Resilience Centre based in Stockholm, Sweden, that has a wonderful explanation of resilience with some insightful videos here. (Coincidentally, this Centre is also funded by MISTRA who are funding our new Future Fashion research project).

The Creative Transition project will be continuing the conversation we have already begun across the colleges with some workshops and more events planned in the next 6 months.

Can designer's help make a better world?

We recently attended the Designing a Better World Symposium at Northumbria University in Newcastle. There were all the usual discussions about how designer's can contribute to social change and to solving the environmental challenges we currently face.

There was also lots of talk of the value of collaboration and how designers will need to work outside their specialist area to tackle these multiple challenges. Jason Bruges and Julia Lohmann, both designers who work across disciplines, talked of the value of collaboration but also made the point that design education does not currently prepare students to work in this way.

Jason describe this kind of designer as a 'hybrid', able to remain a specialist while also remaining open and gathering expertise and knowledge from other areas. He also made the point that, even if we do start to train students in this way, and to consider new ways to approach their role as designers, the jobs dont exist for them. We are training people for the unknown!

This relates to Becky Earley's presentation at our Agendas debate last Friday, about our approach to embedding sustainable design thinking into courses. Here at Chelsea, we teach students new ways to be a textile designer, adding activism and lifecycle thinking under their belts, but then they get out into the real world and are met with a 'ceiling' - there are not enough jobs that exist which can take advantage of this new sort of design activity.

An another note, the highlight from the Northumbria Symposium was Josephine Green's Keynote speech . Green works in what she calls 'social foresight' and has worked at Philips Design for fifteen years. Can designers help make a better world ? She believes, yes if there is a deep purpose behind what design does, and that it is 'sense making'. But no, if we continue with the current industrial production model, and don't move beyond just designing products.

Image: Julia Lohmann

Craft Rally at Chelsea

TED and Chelsea College of Art & Design will be hosting the Craft's Council exciting new initiative called Craft Rally, a network event for makers at all stage of their careers.

The first Craft Rally will take place at Chelsea on 25th March and will include presentations, workshops and opportunities for networking. TED member Becky Earley will be discussing her work as a maker and academic exploring sustainability and Clara Vuletich and the textile collective she is part of, bricolage will be on hand to help participants record their thoughts and ideas onto a tablecloth with 'Cloth Non-Confidential'.

What does craft’s relationship to sustainability, resourcefulness, activism or community mean to your practice? How could collaboration with other craft-makers and disciplines generate new and exciting ways of looking at your own approach? All of these questions and more will be encouraged and explored.

Tickets are £40 and bookings are essential.

It was great to see one of the most innovative fashion researcher at a recent panel discussion about 'design hacking' at the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA). Otto von Busch is a researcher who's work explores how fashion can be re-engineered by consumers for a more self-empowered, bottoms-up approach.

Design hacking seems to have taken off as a concept in the design community and the discussion was chaired by an RSA collaborator, Scott Burnham who has written a paper on design hacktivism. The term 'hacking', has came from computer hackers - people who are able to enter a system or learn and code and then adapt it or improve it.

Otto was adamant that it is not a negative term, as sometimes portrayed. Hacking is not about anarchy and over-throwing the system, it is about infiltrating the system, or learning the 'source code', to improve or adapt it.

Otto explained that in fashion terms, the 'codes' are written by the untouchable, genius designers such as Karl Lagerfield. The code is a mystery that only the designer knows and the fashion consumer is merely the passive receiver of this 'design wisdom'.

Fashion hacktivism however, is when the fashion consumer is able to hack the source code and adapt or change fashion. Otto frames this mainly at the garment level, and he has created projects which offer people knowledge about customising garments or making your own. He also runs workshops and opportunities for people to gain new skills to create their own type of fashion garments.

Otto came to see us at TED last week and we hope to work with him on some porojects in the near future. His PhD thesis has now been published in an easy to read format, called Fashion-able: Hacktivism and Engaged Fashion Design, avaialble to order via his website.

The future of Sustainable Design Education

We were recently at 100% Sustainable at Earls Court, and saw an inspiring presentation of the DEEDS (Design Education and Sustainability) project, which was introduced by Alistair Fuad-Luke. Set up to promote sustainable design (SD) education to educators and professional designers, Fuad-Luke explained they are developing on-line tools for teaching and learning which include a glossary of SD terms, methodologies which can be shared and a space for contributors to develop 'pods', which are open-source, web-based case studies of inspiring SD stories. The aim is to get teachers and designers contributing and feeding back into the project so that SD can become fully integrated into design education and into the design industry in the EU.

Anne Thorpe, who wrote the The Designers Atlas of Sustainability, has posted her thoughts on the future of SD education on her blog Design Activism. Thorpe talks of the need for SD education to become broader in how it views eco or green design and to suggest to students more diverse models of design practise which may include working for social enterprises or public agencies.

Thorpe also believes that the latest trend is around 'social innovation' and that we are going to see a shift toward exploring how design can facilitate relationships and social capital, rather than just designing objects. But the question for education is what kind of training do designers need to understand and enhance social innovation? These are questions which SD educators are just starting to ask now, and here at the TED project we have been asking the question of how the textile deisgner can be a social 'activist'.

Talking of 'design activism', Alistair Fuad Luke, who is the author of the well known The Eco Design Handbook, also mentioned that he is currently writing a book on this theme - seems to be the new buzz term within design.