CSM Public No. 2

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WE’RE GOING TO GETTHIS WRONG

BY PAUL HAYWOOD P.4

TATE EXCHANGE

CREATIVE UNIONS

FUTURO HOUSE RESIDENCY

KAYE TOLAND’S ANTI-ISOLATIONIST BOARD GAME

P.6-7

THOMAS MOORE’S GIN LANE 2016 LIN CHEUNG’S DELAYED REACTIONS

SARAH CHRISTIE’S GRADUATION SPEECH

EMMA KING’S 1984 BY @REALDONALDTRUMP

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SWALLOW IT P.10-11

RESILIENCE AND REDUNDANCY

BY ADAM THORPE ALVA SKOG P.12-13

ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MEMORY WITH ANDREA LUKA ZIMMERMAN

HEBRON CALLING A PERFORMANCE OF PLACE P.16-17

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FUNDAMENTALS

BY OLLY WAINWRIGHT NICK WOODFORD’S THE PECKHAM COAL LINE SHANSHAN LIU’S MIND THE GAP! P.18-19

LOCAL ENCOUNTERS: IGNITION MARKET ROAD GALLERY P.20-21

SHARED FUTURES

BY HENRIETTA THOMPSON P.28

THE OVERCROWDED HOUSING PROJECT WITH CAMDEN COUNCIL THE PUBLIC COLLABORATION LAB

LOCAL ENCOUNTERS:

ON THE ROAD

REPRESENTING THE EVERYDAY

KATY SHAND’S OTHER US

KNOCKS & SHOCKS

ANNA TUHUS’ A STONE’S THROW

CREATIVE CHOICES

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P.24-25

WINNING WORMS

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT WITH THE ELLEN MACARTHUR FOUNDATION

BIODESIGN, BACTERIA AND BATTERIES ARCHIVING THE ANTHROPOCENE SEA-MEAT SEAWEED TOOLS FOR A HOTTER, THIRSTIER PLANET

JENNY BANKS’ SUSTAINABLE FAST FASHION NOWNESS COLLABORATION

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THE OTHER WAY WITH CAROLE COLLET NATSAI CHIEZA’S COELICOLOR AMY CONGDON AND MODERN MEADOW: ZOATM P.34-35

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P.30-31

FUTURE LUXURY WITHOUT WASTE

BY ROSEMARY WALLIN P.36

CAN GRAPHIC DESIGN SAVE YOUR LIFE?

PRISON BREAK

DESIGNING FOR DIALYSIS

LUCY GANLEY’S SHOW YOUR SOLIDARITY

JOAO GIL’S BIOCOMPUTER

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ELIF GENGÖR’S COLIC TOOLS

FROM PATIENTS TO NEIGHBOURS THE LEARNING PROJECT NELSON NOLL’S CURVE P.42-43

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THE CREATIVE COUPLE A TYPEFACE MADE FROM MEMORY JUILE HOWELL’S STONEBRIDGE PEOPLE LIBRARY WALL TO WALL P.44-45

HOME AND BELONGING IN HARLESDEN

THE PICTURE OF HEALTH

WHAT CAN CERAMICS DO?

ANNA-MAIE SOUTHERN’S THE MIND’S EYE

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

DI PENG’S DIMENTIA SIMULATOR

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MUSEUMS ON PRESCRIPTION LAURA FISCHER’S TRAUMA FOCUSED MOVEMENT LANGUAGE P.48-49

TIME, PLACE, UNIQUE AND CHANGE

BY SARAH ELIE

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WE’RE GOING TO GET THIS WRONG PAUL HAYWOOD, DEAN OF ACADEMIC PROGRAMMES ON THE ROLE OF CREATIVE EDUCATION

In the second week of 2018 the new government regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), came into effect with the aim of ensuring that UK higher education be ‘innovative in its approach to student participation, success and employability’. This is something that Jo Johnson, the then Minister for Universities, had been preparing for a number of months, briefing the media with a mixed menu of shock horror revelations about excessive vice-chancellor pay alongside hints at policy initiatives that will deliver fast-track degrees, value for money and student choice.

Scheduled to replace the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Office for Fair Access in April 2018, the OfS is barely concealed as an essential platform that sets the foundation for the mass privatisation of tertiary and higher education or, what most commentators refer to as, the drift towards increasing marketisation.

The government has got its plans for the future of higher education wrong quite simply because it can’t get them right. Those of us working in higher education, and particularly art, design and performance education, don’t seek absolute certainty because we know that there is no such thing. What I’m scared of more than anything is that we, as educators, are expected to engineer employment as a product of art, design and performance education. We are expected to professionalise instincts, free association, human subjectivity, cultural agency and creative independence. Whereas we might and we also might not. The privilege and core value of the arts within a healthy democratic society is its capacity to disrupt and provoke as much as its capacity to achieve prescribed goals.

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John Ruskin referred to the balance of art education as representing heart, head and hand. That might be referred to as attitude, In the future, your best aptitude and application in “The privilege value degree will move you less emotive or poetic lanand core value from zero to professional guage. At the core of this of the arts career in under two years sentiment is the idea that and all for less than a person is seeking to grow within a healthy your grandmother’s state and become effective in the democratic society world. The need to balance pension. It won’t be long before we have driverless one’s emotional intelliis its capacity study centres and partgence with a growing sense to disrupt and exchange options when of knowledge and pragmatic provoke as much trading in qualifications reflection from experience less than five years old. is what brings a person to asits capacity to It’s a purchase that wisdom and most importantachieve prescribed ly, self-determination. will secure your social mobility, your career Education is an endlessly goals.” prospects and your future evolving mission, in permasuccess as a consumer who nent revolution – a jourmade the right choice; ney of personal discovery branded accessories to include an intertwined with expanding technoloeco-friendly push scooter to get you gies and shifting cultural norms that to your next job interview without builds from a base of innate abilileaving any carbon footprint. Or ty, intergenerational tradition and perhaps I’m being cynical? a passion for belonging somewhere in society.

The central problem that relates to this new perspective on cultural Creativity is a standard ethos and investment (if I’m allowed to refer principle at the core of learning to education as cultural investment) that some choose to harness and is the difference between cultural exploit in discrete measure and commissioning and that which others rely on to balance their inherently emerges from responsive experiences and promote their and reflexive collective endeavour. independence of thought and reason.

At any point, any attempts to According to the government, the instrumentalise education inevitably whole education paradigm must expose denuded presumptions and shift and is shifting away from priorities and these, by nature, creativity in learning and from cannot sensitively reflect humanities creative disciplines of practice. interwoven and complex curiosity or It may safely be assumed that the obsessions. Where targeted policyintended outcome is to limit the led cultural interventions do learner’s freedoms and to enhance occur, the supposed benefits to the the predictability of education affected community (in this instance, as a service. But this is not the potentially everyone) tend to be role of creative education – not in measured against metrics normalised schools, colleges, universities, by organised political thought and community facilities, adult education political objectives. classrooms, or anywhere else.

Quite obviously, these are not necessarily primary motivators that can inspire willing engagement from people, as people. They may, and normally do, reference common anxieties or ideas that can be easily propagated, but they will rarely align with the internal nature of each unique individual who wants to pursue their own sense of agency and self-worth. Planned and concentrated cultural investment will always assume a degree of impact, the question is whether this complements the needs or instincts of intelligent, sentient, creatively motivated and curious human beings.

PRO VOCA TION

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Photos: Belinda Lawley

PROVOCATION

SCHOOL’S OUT In a twist to the usual life in the College, over a hundred Fine Art students created STUDIO COMPLEX – a public-access art school at Tate Modern in January 2017. Students became teachers and galleries became studios, standard orthodoxies of the art school were upturned. These week-long events, part of the TATE EXCHANGE programme, were designed, built and run in public view with opportunities for visitors to engage through workshops, talks, events and studio-making. With over 4,000 members of the public enrolling for the first outing, Central Saint Martins returned to Tate Modern in 2018

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Here, Alex Schady, Director of the Fine Art programme, talks about arts education, studio space and putting his students in public view.

THIS IS AN ART SCHOOL, the first TATE EXCHANGE event, appeared to turn the art school inside out?

Yes, that’s something that interests me across the board – the power relationships that exist in any encounter. The problem with teaching is that the minute you have assessment as part of it, it’s difficult to flip or play with the power dynamics. I hate the idea that teachers have knowledge and

students don’t; it’s a much more dynamic relationship than that. So, for an external project like this we can create a more horizontal hierarchy that’s open and genuine.

THIS IS AN ART SCHOOL presented a diverse timetable of lessons from camera obscura workshops to Art-O-Rama gameshow performances, but at its heart was a concern about the vulnerability of arts education.

The crisis in art education feels so urgent and pertinent. In the current economic and political climate there is a systemic assault on arts education. Art is increasingly isolated in the school timetable and cuts to local funding put galleries’ educational and outreach programmes at risk. It was a natural transition to turn those concerns into something public-facing, participatory, celebratory – importantly, not a moan fest.

It was saying ‘this is what art can be and it’s tragic that bad things are happening to it when you look how exciting it is.’The week was chaotic, bonkers, a bloody mess and all the better for it. The energy of it felt exciting. I had those broader concerns in mind but each participant wasn’t responsible for conveying those, they were responsible for their particular lesson. The same applies to the second edition in 2018, we have got concerns that form the foundation of the event but it’s not the students’ responsibility to shoulder them directly.

Returning to TATE EXCHANGE for the second time, did you know immediately what the subject would be?

It came more slowly. It occurred to us that last year we were thinking about students while they were with us, and this year we should think about once they’ve left the College. London, where we’re based, was once a city with overlooked spaces open to occupation and experimentation but it has become an increasingly difficult environment for emerging artists. Those graduating from art school now find fewer spaces in which to work, with affordable studios a thing of the past. According to the GLA’s Artists’ Workspace Study, 30% of artists’ studios in London will be lost between 2014 and 2019.

What will the London of the future look like if you can only afford to live here if you’re a banker or a city lawyer? What happens to the cultural diversity, does it cease to be a city and become a financial centre? That’s what was in my mind.

So how does that manifest itself at the TATE EXCHANGE event?

We want to answer it with a positive stance again. Artists can respond because they don’t need to rely on the romantic model of the studio to inhabit the city. They might be using their local park as a studio, or a local radio station, an online space or social media thread. I know that if I throw that

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Photo: John Sturrock

Photo: Oscar Chik

CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS’ CONTRIBUTION TO TATE EXCHANGE WILL CONTINUE INTO 2019.

Central Saint Martins says farewell to the spaceship that has been resident on its roof for the past two years THE FUTURO HOUSE, designed by Matti Suuronen in the 60s, was brought to the College by artist Craig Barnes as, he describes, ‘a catalyst for future thought and action’.

Over two years, the alternative space has been home to many gigs, exhibitions, film shoots, research salons, crits, lectures, student experiments and creative residencies.

‘Having handed over the Futuro keys to Central Saint Martins students and staff to populate with futural imaginings, it has been a delight to see what grew within this oversized Petri dish of creative oozings, but also simply to witness those transported afar by the space. It is time for it to slip away, co-ordinates firmly set for destination unknown.’ Craig Barnes

While it’s impossible to encapsulate the impact the landing of this craft has had on the College, here are a few highlights.

Students from across disciplines found inspiration in the Space Age setting, for example Benjamin Benmoyal, BA Fashion Design, who used THE FUTURO HOUSE as the backdrop for his collection. Woven from cassette tape, the collection took cues from theories of metamodernism and the naive optimism of the 60s vision of the future (pictured above). At the start of 2017, METAPHONICA (the College’s annual collision of music and art) set up in the space for a 24-hour set. But the most impressive feat of creative endurance was in April of that same year, when the Futuro took onboard four Foundation students as residents to live and work within the structure. Over the course of four days, the students experimented and collaborated, all captured in a daily video diary.

But one can only ground a spaceship for so long, and now we wish THE FUTURO HOUSE all the best on its adventures into space and time.

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TATE EXCHANGE brings art practice into the gallery for the public to see. Is that problematic? Does art practice become some kind of performance?

It’s difficult to make art in a central London institution without being visible. I’m not just thinking of Tate Modern but also the Central Saint Martins building – they lend themselves to being visible. The way in which students publish their work on social media is so visible. My question is: how do we best equip them to work with that? Looking at the traditional model of an artist’s studio, there is privacy but also perhaps loneliness and a lack of dialogue. The plus sides are that you can make mistakes with nobody seeing them. The more public models have positives too, it’s about connectivity, active critique, camaraderie and discursive spaces – those are a few of the ways the new studio may nurture the future artist.

BACK TO THE FUTURO

PROVOCATION

question out to a few hundred of our students they are going to present diverse, imaginative and open responses. So, STUDIO COMPLEX presents our students’ reimaginings for the studios of the future. And once again, the public are invited to join in and be an active part of the event, this time, becoming studio assistants.

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CREATIVITY KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES Launched in 2017, CREATIVE UNIONS is an initiative of Central Saint Martins and the other Colleges of University of the Arts London which brings together events, actions and voices to demonstrate that creativity must operate across borders – geographical, social and disciplinary

THE EXHIBITION In September 2017, CREATIVE UNIONS the exhibition brought together individual and collaborative projects from the past year in College On the opening of the exhibition, Head of College Jeremy Till said: ‘As I look outwards from Central Saint Martins to the economic, social and environmental situations that are emerging, I feel deeply worried. But when I look inwards at the intense intelligence and energy emerging from here, I feel that there is hope that must be sustained. The CREATIVE UNIONS exhibition concentrates all that intensity into a single place.’

Photo: Brendan Bell

TALE OF A TOOLKIT For CREATIVE UNIONS, Villalba Lawson created badges, posters and even a bespoke typeface inspired by travel, car stickers and registration type Villalba Lawson is the studio of design duo Christopher Lawson and Marcos Villalba who met while studying BA Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins.

Responding to the brief, they took inspiration from oval car stickers that state the vehicle’s country of origin using initials. The sense of travel and mobility was the context for the design, that roads remain the arterial connections across national boundaries.

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PROVOCATION

Creative Unions launch photos: John Sturrock

‘It’s about creating a nation with no borders. CREATIVE UNIONS is, in a way, its own nationality made up of like-minded individuals.’ Marcos Villalba Midpoint in the design process, Lawson suggested designing a typeface for the project. Confined only to capitals, the type takes its cues from car number plates continuing the theme.

By overlaying the same letters from different plates Villalba Lawson arrived at Utopia’s forms (see Utopia at work on the cover and theme pages of this very newspaper). For the exhibition, the duo extended the typeface across different scripts with the help of Seb McLauchlan. Visitors were welcomed to the exhibition in 40 languages, a list that only scratches the surface of the international mix of staff and students at Central Saint Martins.

SUPPORT YOUR OWN CREATIVE UNIONS PROJECT WITH THE FREE EVENT TOOLKIT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD AT: www.arts. ac.uk/csm/about-csm/creative-unions www.villalba-lawson.com

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MAKE IT OR BREAK IT SERIOUS PLAY Kaye Toland BA Product Design, 2017 MAKE IT OR BREAK IT is a three-step game explicitly dealing with the ramifications of isolationism. Working around notions of wallbuilding and wall-breaking, it exposes how entrenched cultural barriers can become.

‘In light of Brexit, my aim was to share the lessons we have learned in Belfast about barrier building and segregation and how, once you build a wall, even when the wall is eventually gone, the divide will always be there.’ www.kayetoland.com

experience has been all about investigating new ideas with other people. About changing your mind. Changing other people’s minds. Being surprised and challenged by other people’s perspectives and being compelled to find out more. Trying things with no idea if they will work but knowing that the risk and the journey will somehow be worth it.

Some of us developed our final projects from what we discovered about other countries; others explored their own heritage. In doing so, they also educated the rest of us about, for example, Gabija, the Lithuanian Fire Goddess and the Namibian desert’s weather pattern and what design could do with it.

As the great Bard from Barking Billy Bragg famously sang: “what do they know of England, who only England know?”

A Figure of Speech Weeks after the Brexit referendum in 2016, Sarah Christie was graduating from BA Ceramic Design. As valedictorian, her speech summed up perfectly uncertain futures and the role of artists and designers to make sense of the world

On or around Friday 24 June, we received our degree results.

It was the culmination of everyone’s hard work, excitement, frustration... hard times, good times, and so many questions: “What am I doing?” “Why am I doing it?” “How am I going to do it in time for the assessment?”

LIBRARY Sarah Christie BA Ceramic Design, 2016 LIBRARY began with four words: ‘imagination’, ‘curiosity’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘questions’. It has since grown though public participation to over 1,500 contributions.

The Ancient Greeks wrote on ostraca (potsherds) to cast their votes, send messages and ostracise unpopular citizens. For LIBRARY, Christie invites visitors to select an ostracon – ceramic shards made from a hundred and fifty cast bowls – and nominate something that offers the means to overcome real or imagined boundaries. Libraries, after all, offer access to everyone.

Many languages are represented in Christie’s LIBRARY, reflecting changing sentiments before, during and after the EU referendum on 23 June, right up to its most recent exhibition in November 2017.

At the dawn of 2018, we asked Christie to return to her speech and here is her response: ‘A few chaotic and disturbing months after graduation, Theresa May spoke these words at her party conference: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.

You don’t understand what the very word citizenship means”.

But those of us who live, work, and creatively collaborate see ourselves as part of a community that includes, say, you as a European, her as a South Asian, and me as an embarrassed Brit.

Our strongest ties may not be our labels of where we came from, but instead our shared values and fruitful collaboration. We are looking for opportunities to create, learn, and exchange ideas, rather than retreating and shutting doors.

Back in June 2016, I thought that it was up to us all to “keep holding the doors open”.

The doors turn out to be heavier than they looked. We might need to rally our friends to help us and speak up with us.

As artists and designers, we may choose to be citizens of anywhere and everywhere, engaging with the universal to create the new, the surprising and the unexpected, and in the meantime finding ways to keep the doors open.’

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That particular Friday morning however we were distracted by another result, something bigger and more daunting, confusing and rather unsettling.

The EU referendum result threatens our relationship with our fellow Europeans, and turns it into something new and

At Central Saint Martins we have been part of an international, outward-facing community. The

We began as fellow students, and have become friends.

In the future we will work together, start businesses together, employ one another, pass on job opportunities and recommendations, share ideas, agree, disagree...

It might seem like the UK has shut the door in the world’s face. But I would call on us all to keep holding the doors open because one of the many wonderful things that an art and design education has taught us, is that however safe and comfortable it may feel, you don’t do anything interesting if you operate as an island.

Our jobs as designers and artists are to make sense of the world and find ways of making it better for the benefit of others. There’s plenty to do.’

PROVOCATION

‘Good afternoon, and thank you all for being here. I am incredibly honoured to have been asked to speak on behalf of the students this afternoon. After all the hard work, we are here to celebrate our degrees, mark the end of our time at Central Saint Martins and look forward to beginning our creative lives.

still unknown. This matters to students at Central Saint Martins because we collaborate, exchange and contribute to scholarship across national borders.

The world that we’re graduating into may feel uncertain, colder and less welcoming. So, let’s hold one another close as we navigate the stormy waters, listen to and support each other and above all, keep going.

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GIN LANE REVISITED In 2016, Thomas Moore, a thirdyear BA Graphic Design student, updated Hogarth’s GIN LANE for the fast food age Thomas Moore spent his summer in McDonalds sketching: ‘I wanted to do a personal project, I was looking at fast food and society, our negative relationship with food. I was going there every day to draw people as they ate.

I exaggerated everything so it looked grotesque.’

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PROVOCATION

At the same time, he happened across a call out for a commission from the Royal Society for Public Health (RSHP). To mark its 160th anniversary, the RSPH was looking for someone to reimagine William Hogarth’s famous GIN LANE cartoon. Seeing the commission from the middle of his McDonalds project ‘it was a perfect fit,’ he recalls.

The RSPH selected Moore and he set out dissecting the 1751 GIN LANE, analysing its composition and planning how to update it for a contemporary audience incorporating today’s public health issues. Where Hogarth had focused on gin consumption and malnutrition, Moore looked to fast food, obesity and mental health.

Hogarth’s original was darkly comic, something the young designer is inspired by. ‘Hogarth was the grandfather of satirical cartoons and his work can be so dark,’ Moore explains, ‘in his GIN LANE there’s a guy walking down the street with a baby impaled on a stick.’ While not so graphic in its portrayal, the contemporary reinterpretation retains this bleak sense. For Moore, it is important that his target isn’t the people depicted.

It is an attack on the fast food corporations and payday lenders.

Like Hogarth’s original, it’s not a criticism of those characters in the image but society at large and the inhuman structures that essentially prey on those people.

Once the components were set, Moore began drawing out the final piece (the original was an engraving, this contemporary version is pen and ink).

Following the unveiling of GIN LANE 2016 at the RSPH’s offices in London, the media attention saw Moore interviewed by John Humphrys on Radio 4’s TODAY PROGRAMME. There are galleries interested in showing GIN LANE 2016 as well as talks about creating prints and perhaps more Hogarth-inspired commissions, BEER STREET could be next.

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SWALLOW IT LONDON/PARIS is an annual collaboration between Central Saint Martins and The Paris College of Art Foundation programmes, supported by Eurostar. In 2016, students responded to the theme of Europe and we caught up with Scene Peng, the project winner on this side of the Channel How did you come up with the idea for this project?

My partner from Paris College of Art guided me there. She mailed me a hand-made notebook of research and there was the sentence ‘the world-wide game of politics and consumerism’. It came to my mind when I was drinking hot water with my pills. I suddenly felt like diagnosing Europe — it was sick too. It needed someone to prescribe it pills.

How did your ideas develop?

I wanted to tell a truth in my way, like a forecaster. I figured if something honest and specific exists in my work, the audience would simply relate to it. Like, ‘in the particular is contained the universal’, the quote from James Joyce. So, in my way, telling the story of Brexit.

1984 BY @REALDONALDTRUMP Emma King MA Communication Design, 2017 King’s project is a rewriting of George Orwell’s dystopian novel NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR using tweets by President Donald Trump. The origins of King’s first politically-oriented project lie in her interest in the relationship between published texts and the Internet.

‘It was a struggle to narrow down all my thoughts into one project,’ she says, ‘but then as Trump began sending out “alternative facts”, in response Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR rose up the book charts. So, could I fit these two texts together in a way that would unite meaning but offer a design authorship?’

The result is a scroll of tweets with one word of each highlighted in red, allowing the first chapter of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR to be read vertically. It’s a clash in one object, between the permanence of traditional publishing and the transience of digital communication and, in an extension of that, the disparity between an enduring truth and a malleable one. Set exquisitely in Sabon typeface, the project not only cements Trump’s tweets, but also highlights the triviality and hypocrisy of his statements. ‘He’s tweeted all of these words, and I’m simply taking them out of context – which is exactly what he does.

I’m using his own words to hang him with,’ says King. www.emmaking.net

DELAYED REACTIONS Lin Cheung Senior Lecturer, Textiles and Jewellery

I felt moved to carve a brooch from Lapis Lazuli and draw gold wire down for the stars because since the EU Referendum in 2016, I know I’m not alone. I’d like to share my work, freely give the power to wear it to show solidarity and acknowledge the uncertainty that faces a great many people.’ www.lincheung.co.uk

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‘They reflect the mixed emotions I feel about the world around me. Pin badges are traditionally ofthe-moment. They’re cheap, quick to make and considered throwaway – lasting only as long as necessary to get the message across. In contrast to that, working in stone is the opposite: it’s slow and unpredictable and often has a limited palette.

That limitation is a good test of what remains in my thoughts, what surfaces after the dust has settled.

PROVOCATION

Lin Cheung has had a busy year, not only shortlisted for the BBC Radio 4 WOMAN’S HOUR CRAFT PRIZE but also being awarded the prestigious Françoise van den Bosch Award 2018. The Senior Lecturer for BA Jewellery Design, Textiles and Jewellery programme, presented her DELAYED REACTIONS series of handcrafted pin badges at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour Craft Prize exhibition, which will tour the UK until late 2019.

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RESILIENCE AND REDUNDANCY Adam Thorpe, Professor in Socially Responsive Design and Principal Investigator of PUBLIC COLLABORATION LAB (PCL) on sharing creative superabundance

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Resilience through redundancy is a natural strategy. Nassim Taleb, a scholar and writer who explores how systems handle disorder, comments on the propensity of nature to ‘overinsure’ itself suggesting that ‘layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems.’1 He points to human physiology as evidence of this; two kidneys when one will do, ‘spare parts’ and extra capacity in lungs, neural systems and arterial apparatus. So, for a system to be resilient it must have redundancy, that is, multiple and diverse ways of achieving desired outcomes.

In response to austerity, local authorities have been encouraged to become more efficient. Local and national scrutiny, including legislative tools like The Local Government and Accountability Act 2014, has driven many councils headlong into cost-saving measures, round upon round of restructuring and cost-cutting, in an attempt to deliver ‘more for less’.5 This sounds like a sensible response, most would agree that waste is rarely a virtue. However, efficiency is not synonymous with effectiveness, and often that which is perceived as waste is in fact the redundancy essential to resilience.

Local government in the UK – the city, district and borough councils responsible for public services aimed at ensuring equitable access to public goods for residents – is under unprecedented attack in this regard. Here, redundancy too often refers to reductions in staff numbers delivering public services rather than the ‘superabundance’ that affords surplus ways and means of achieving goals within a resilient system.2 In the UK, local government has four main sources of funding: the Revenue Support Grant received from Central Government; monies from local business via the Business Rates Retention Scheme; Council Tax paid by residents and fees and charges for council services. Bank bailouts and repayment of fiscal initiatives such as the Private Finance Initiative, introduced in the 90s as a way to fund public infrastructure projects, have seen the burden of debt servicing upon local government increase at the same time that public funds distributed from central government via the Revenue Support Grant have decreased – by an estimated average of 37% between 20112016. Camden, the borough in which Central Saint Martins sits, was worse hit with a 50% reduction.3 Nationally, a further £7.8bn, or 78% reduction is predicted over the next four years.

This bleak forecast anticipates an unprecedented number of councils

The pursuit of efficiency beyond that which is effective will inevitably reduce the quality of public services and impact negatively on the lives of the people that use them. This is especially true of relational services, those which are ‘deeply and profoundly based on the quality of interpersonal relations between participants’ including youth services and adult social care.6 The latter currently accounts for roughly 30 to 35% of total local government expenditure, expenditure which is to be significantly reduced in coming years.7

FOOTNOTES

3. LOCAL GOVERNMENT REPORT: THE IMPACT OF FUNDING REDUCTIONS ON LOCAL AUTHORITIES (NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE, NOVEMBER 2014), ACCESSED ON NOVEMBER 1, 2016, HTTPS://WWW.NAO.ORG.UK/WP-CONTENT/ UPLOADS/2014/11/IMPACT-OF-FUNDINGREDUCTIONS-ON-LOCAL-AUTHORITIES.PDF

1. NASSIM TALEB, ANTI-FRAGILE: HOW TO LIVE IN A WORLD WE DON’T UNDERSTAND (LONDON: ALLEN LANE, 2012), P44.

2. OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY DEFINES REDUNDANCY AS ‘THE STATE OR QUALITY OF BEING REDUNDANT, SUPERABUNDANCE, SUPERFLUITY.’

education can contribute, finding synergy in learning opportunities for students and researchers and the need for place-based solutions to local challenges, bringing skills in creative and collaborative experimentation to help build the capacity of councils and communities to find new ways of meeting societal goals in times of austerity and uncertainty. Here the University is a social resource with the capacity to bring redundancy, understood as a superabundance of creative resources, to those to whom it is denied through efficiency.

being driven into financial crisis, reducing the support they can offer to the communities they serve.4

Worse still, as efficiency drives out redundancy it removes the ‘space’ to experiment, reflect and learn – reducing opportunities to find alternative ways and means of meeting societal needs and goals in the process. In this way efficiency not only denies the effectiveness of existing ways of doing things it can also deny the possibility of finding new ways of meeting residents needs effectively – making efficiency the enemy of innovation. In this scenario the question of ‘How can we do more for less?’ becomes one of ‘How can we do more innovation for less?’ and ‘Where can we find the redundancy for local government and the communities they serve to experiment, reflect and learn? It is here that design

4. SEAN NOLAN AND JOANNE PITT, BALANCING LOCAL AUTHORITY BUDGETS (CIPFA, 2016), ACCESSED JANUARY 5, 2017, HTTP://WWW.CIPFA.ORG/POLICY-ANDGUIDANCE/PUBLICATIONS/B/BALANCING-LOCALAUTHORITY-BUDGETS-ONLINE

‘Here the University is a social resource with the capacity to bring redundancy, understood as a superabundance of creative resources, to those to whom it is denied through efficiency.’

Responding to this opportunity is the PCL. A platform for creative collaboration, the PCL brings together students, residents, community organisations and businesses, supported by researchers, tutors and council officers to co-design and deliver projects that address the specific challenges of the borough. Challenges so far addressed include; finding new ways to maintain and extend library services to housebound residents while building relationships and providing early intervention in health and social care; finding new ways to support residents to deal with the effects of overcrowded housing, including collaborative service models for self-build furniture tailored to residents specific domestic requirements; reshaping youth centres to facilitate the integration of youth services to extend support and opportunity to young people in Camden; exploring and navigating barriers to active lifestyles and healthy diet that contribute to obesity; finding ways of working with residents to increase recycling rates; findings ways to consult more meaningfully with citizens on public issues such as the future of libraries and the planning process.

In 2018 we hope to sustain and extend these collaborations, sharing the learning from past projects to find new ways of living well together, learning together by doing together.

TURN TO PAGES 22-23 FOR MORE ON THE PUBLICATION COLLABORATION LAB. www.publiccollaborationlab.com

5. JAMIE BARTLETT, GETTING MORE FOR LESS: EFFICIENCY IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR (DEMOS, 2009) P7.

6. CARLA CIPOLLA AND EZIO MANZINI, ‘RELATIONAL SERVICES,’ KNOWLEDGE, TECHNOLOGY & POLICY 1, NO.22 (MARCH 2009): 45-50.

7. LOCAL GOVERNMENT ASSOCIATION, ADULT SOCIAL CARE FUNDING: 2016 STATE OF THE NATION REPORT (LGA, NOVEMBER 2016), ACCESSED JANUARY 10, 2017, HTTP://WWW.LOCAL.GOV.UK/

PROVOCATION

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Illustration by Alva Skog, BA Graphic Design

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Images: ERASE AND FORGET Film Stills

ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MEMORY James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz is one of America’s highest decorated Vietnam veterans and the alleged real-life inspiration behind RAMBO. A contentious public figure, he also killed 400 people, turned against Washington and moved to the Nevada desert. Filmed over ten years, ERASE AND FORGET, Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s portrait of Bo, is an inquiry into the limits of deniability and embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions

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The following is an excerpt from a discussion between Zimmerman, Lecturer in Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins, and executive producer and film curator Gareth Evans.

How did the project begin?

I met Bo first in 2003 when my colleagues (Christine Cynn, Joshua Oppenheimer, Michael Uwemedimo and I, as part of our film collective Vision Machine) were researching US involvement in the 1965 genocide in Indonesia. We were exploring a way to use filmmaking as an experimental political tool, as well as a means for imagining or bringing to the fore, structural and state violence: the very things that can’t easily be expressed… the murky arena of power. We researched in London, Indonesia and in the United States. We interviewed several people, including Bo, who worked in Intelligence during the early 1960s. I soon realised there was an incredible story to be told.

Through Bo as the nexus for various realities that came together in his life experience – propaganda, private memory, myth, public memory, etc, – we learn about ourselves as a society and as human beings.

Through someone so different from me, I could enter a space that was unfamiliar, that allowed me to question my own attitudes and in this way the film became a negotiation between beliefs, ideology and judgement. The film explores themes that are bigger than Bo

or I, and since I believe we are implicated in the history we inhabit, we must never stop digging to see what we find. Otherwise, we are just walking along the edges of psychic and embodied knowledge and our times clearly show us that it is simply not enough to pursue such a strategy. We need to cross into ambiguous, often very difficult and complex territories to understand the reasons for our condition.

Why have you made this film? This is a huge question of course, but I mean it in terms of you a German woman filming over a decade with an American soldier who has killed 400 people.

I was born in Germany and never had a chance to know my own family well, one grandmother having been expelled from her country of origin and the other abandoned by her mother who went to the US. Their children (my parents) became damaged people too. The intergenerational trauma of silences around the legacies of war shaped their psyches. This may be why I have always been drawn to lives that are in various ways marginalised or lived apart from the ‘norm’. I am interested in the stories we tell ourselves and those told to us. I also have a healthy disrespect for hierarchies and for inherited, unearned, authority.

I am equally intrigued by the contested relationship between public and private memory.

Why do some people choose to perpetrate extreme violence and how does society use culture to create the conditions for such actions to be seen as heroic (or evil)?

Much of the US commentary to date around the film has focused on Bo Gritz’s associations with the Far Right and this seems to be unbalancing the reception of the film’s wider exploration of all sorts of forms of violence, both personal and social.

My concerns have always been along these larger lines. Through Bo’s experience, I have sought to explore and grapple with these larger issues of structural violence (economic, political,

military and often social). I have recorded his admissions of horrendous acts of violence in his foreign military activities. As citizens we support these structures (whether we like it or not). There can be no moral high ground. He is both caricature and legend as well as a contradictory human being, full of diverse impulses.

As the child of post-war German parents, I have lived alongside the notorious silence around Nazi association on a nationwide level all my life. I do not in any way want to diminish the seriousness of any concerns that do remain in this regard, and although Bo has distanced himself from any such ideology, he has not publicly condemned others who claim him as their hero. I believe that any proper and lasting understanding only derives from struggling to overcome the instinctual barriers we have to such dialogue. However, I do find it incredibly telling that Bo’s declarations as an individual have elicited, to date, very strong responses from certain quarters, while detailed descriptions of covert US atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere, have barely merited mention.

We seem perennially unable to deal with large-scale structural violence, remaining obsessed with individual acts at the expense of larger horrors.

Any expression of extremism does not simply arrive fully formed from nowhere. This is why I have chosen to concentrate on the pervasive, ongoing and deeply disturbing structural violence which is at the heart of Bo’s life (which he has promoted as a soldier). It is the bringing of this violence into the light that is one of my main ambitions for this film.

ERASE AND FORGET WAS RELEASED IN THE UK ON 2 MARCH 2018. www.fugitiveimages.org.uk www.eraseandforget.com

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HEBRON CALLING

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Palestinian embroidery collective Women in Hebron and BA Textile Design students cross borders on SIX BRANCH project A group of students huddle around a laptop, as their counterparts appear on the screen, heavily pixelated and, at moments, indiscernible. The conversation stops and starts as, like the vision, the sound comes in and out of focus. This is one of many design meetings between BA Textile Design students and embroiderers from Women In Hebron as they join forces to create their first collaborative collection.

It’s testament to the determination of those involved that a few months later, in February 2017, the SIX BRANCH project launched with eight finished pieces – each one designed at Central Saint Martins and made in Hebron – 3,500km separating the processes.

The project – named after a Palestinian style of dress with six vertical bands of embroidery – began life when

Senior Lecturer in Textile Design Linda Florence met Nawal Slemiah, Director of Women in Hebron.

‘One of my friends connected me with Nawal and we talked about dream projects that could happen one day,’ recalls Florence, ‘the collective sells pieces because people want to help the organisation, it’s a charitable purchase but Nawal wants her audience to buy the work because they love it, because they want to keep it. So we had the idea of connecting her wonderful makers with our students who could share their understanding of the market here.’

SIX BRANCH was set up as a dialogue across borders, with textiles as a shared interest. As a material language for identity, textiles are a cultural expression.

The students learnt about the traditional contexts of Palestinian textiles while also testing their ability to communicate throughout a production process. While Slemiah, the driving force behind Women in Hebron, was eager to engage with contemporary design, to open up new markets while celebrating, and pushing, the skills at the heart of the collective’s craft.

At the project’s starting point, 70 first-year students

were introduced to Women in Hebron via a skype call. Vincent Fean, who recently retired as the UK Consul General in Jerusalem, was also invited to speak about the context of Palestine. ‘There are lots of international students who may have never heard of Palestine,’ says Florence, ‘so he described the barriers to creative practice there, explaining what he’d experienced as the problems and opportunities for trade.’

‘Learning about the political and social climate in Palestine and Hebron was a highlight… gaining understanding and perspective of everyday life for the women and witnessing how important the embroidery is to their sense of purpose.’

Helen Milne, student The students explored the textile traditions of Palestine through a series of workshops. Once they had reached their final designs, eight were selected. The resulting designs ranged from a magnified pomegranate or geographical maps to a reworked Keffiyeh scarf or bold ‘Made in Palestine’ statements.

The students set about creating contemporary designs inspired by traditional Palestinian textiles that would, in turn, push the embroiderers’ own practices in a new direction.

SIX BRANCH was set up as a dialogue across borders with textiles as a shared interest.

The prototypes landed at Central Saint Martins and the students opened the parcels to see their products in the flesh for the first time. The project stretches design and making across national borders, combining the strengths of the two groups to create something unique.

Importantly, SIX BRANCH does not follow one direction but instead is reciprocal; once the first version of the design is completed, the embroiderers then create their own version in reply.

Colours may change, or designs including statements and maps may alter to reflect the maker’s life experience.

At the close of one of the final Skype calls, one of the students asks what is Slemiah’s hope for the future.

‘To be designers, like you,’ she responds. SIX BRANCH is the first collaboration of its kind for the Women of Hebron.

This is only the beginning as the embroiderers work on new pieces under their own creative direction, and the students apply what they’ve learnt as they move into their professional lives. Crossing borders with stitches, the SIX BRANCH collaboration continues to build a sustainable future for traditional textile skills. www.sixbranch.com

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A PERFORMANCE OF PLACE In their first year, MA Performance Design and Practice students live and work in a European city – an experience that culminates in a public performance inspired by their surroundings For 2017, the cohort relocated to Athens in Greece. ‘The piece has to respond to the place in which they’re situated,’ says Course Leader Michael Spencer. ‘We wanted a city that was lively and had a political landsape, one that the students could engage with at a local level. In Greece, it was about what was happening politically now. Athens is a place of extremes: contemporary and ancient, rich and poor, anarchist and touristic.’

Funded by an Erasmus Mobility Award, the project places students in the city for 11-12 weeks, mapping and interpreting what they experience, creating new relationships with local people and setting up collaborations.

This unusual setup lands students in an unfamiliar city and requires them to become embedded both in the place but also in the process of creating a performance: ‘Usually, we ask students to be creative during a particular timetable but the real creativity happens in bars after 10pm when they’re all fed up with each other. That’s how it really is. Creative people are working on creative things the whole time, it’s obsessive and it’s part of your life.’

‘Everything in Athens is about human-tohuman relationships,’ says Nasia Papavasiliou who took part in 2017’s placement, ‘it’s about making connections. The whole city is so different to London… You can see what’s happening in Europe, right there in Athens.

London can make you feel separated sometimes.

But in Athens, you can’t avoid it.’

With the cohort divided into two groups, Papavasiliou worked with eight fellow students, and the initial weeks were spent exploring and gathering ideas until the time came to filter them and start sketching out the performance. Interested in primitive materials like water and clay, the group built up a physical performance that the student describes as both ‘non-linear and non-literal’.

The word ‘unique’ maybe misused today but that’s the only way to describe the EUROPEAN PLACEMENT project. Every year a performance is born from the connection forged between particular people and a particular place; students return with a new understanding of their resilience and capacity to create something from nothing.

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There were two performances of ELOS, attended by locals as well as visitors to art fair documenta, also happening at that time in the Greek capital. Throughout the performances clay became mud, elements broke and were remade, materials were transformed again and again.

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‘In Athens, we started to see how things circulate over time,’ she explains.

Preoccupied by both Athens’ celebrated history and its current political context, the group latched onto the Greek myth of Sisyphus whose punishment was to push a boulder up a steep hill only to see it roll back down, an act repeated for eternity. The performance, titled ELOS, used physicality rather than speech and reflected humanity’s inability to escape its nature, condemned to a cyclical fate like Sisyphus. ‘We kept talking about the circularity of events; it was quite existential and framed what’s going on in Athens as a broader metaphor.’

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that is often absent from the myopic world of architecture education. The format was kept intentionally snappy, with speakers given just five minutes each to set out their stall, before a discussion and contributions from the audience.

The debates covered the fundamentals of housing, planning, land, industry, public art and landscape, tackling the status quo and asking what could come next. The audience’s conclusion from most of the debates seemed to have been to go and work in the public sector, become a politician or start fomenting the next revolution.

Students protesting outside Mipin. Photo: Neba Sere

DEBATING THE FUNDAMENTALS

the Architecture Foundation, RIBA, Soane Museum, etc. – and many publications and online platforms where people espouse their opinions, but there are very few chances for a real live discussion, where opposing views can be aired frankly and passionately and the audience can truly participate.

Architecture critic of The Guardian and chair of the FUNDAMENTALS debate series, Oliver Wainwright, explains why the profession needs space for discourse and dissent

FUNDAMENTALS was aimed at filling this gap, providing a forum for debate around the forces shaping our cities – the invisible networks of planning, funding and the economy that lie beneath architecture. For the first series I was determined to invite people at the coalface of shaping the places that we live and work, but who explicitly weren’t architects.

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I was delighted when Mel Dodd and Andreas Lang from the Spatial Practice Programme approached me to curate a series of events at Central Saint Martins as I felt there was a huge appetite (and a big void) for public debate on architecture. There are plenty of architectural lectures in London – at

I thought it would be interesting to hear from the economists, planners, developers and consultants who operate in the wider context

Having begun by looking outwards, 2018’s FUNDAMENTALS series focuses the spotlight on the profession of architecture, taking a long hard look in the mirror to tackle the way we work – from training, to labour practices, to how projects are procured. The provocative premise is that architectural education is in crisis, staggering on as an overlong, overpriced indulgence with a tenuous grip on reality. Meanwhile, architectural practice only survives by running an exploited labour force of overworked, underpaid, precariously employed staff, fuelling an industry devoid of the power it once had. Ultimately, the best projects often go to the worst practices, with risk-averse procurement systems leading to work being awarded to global conglomerates and safe pairs of hands. The architectural profession is broken at every level – how can we start to fix it?

TO VIEW BOTH DEBATE SERIES, SEARCH ‘FUNDAMENTALS’ AT www.arts.ac.uk/csm/

MIND THE GAP! A CREATIVE ANTI-LAND BANKING CAMPAIGN Shanshan Liu MA Narrative Environments, 2017

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MIND THE GAP! is a creative campaign against land banking, a practice in which property developers hoard undeveloped plots of land to inflate prices, preventing smaller housebuilders or community groups from accessing land of their own.

Through tours and inflatable interventions, MIND THE GAP! highlights the social gap in the official responses to the housing crisis.

This project is designed for young adults and families who live in London and cannot afford to rent or buy a home. It raises awareness and opens people’s mind on the current housing crisis, protesting particularly the impact of land banking with the hope of provoking action from the local councils.

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THE PECKHAM COAL LINE: RE-IMAGINING BIDWELL STREET Nick Woodford MA ARCH, 2017 Nick Woodford alighted on a series of wasted spaces in his local area in south London and, through a process of conversations and collaborations, is repurposing them into THE PECKHAM COAL LINE. Interested in spaces with the potential to be something more, Woodford realised that using a bit of imagination, you could connect Queens Road and Rye Lane with a 900m linear park. ‘It opens up a whole bunch of larger spaces, old coal drops, stable yards, disused bits of truncated road and cul-de-sacs,’ says Woodford, ‘all of these things by themselves are non-places, places for dumping and parking but suddenly they get connected and become a whole lot more useful.’

Setting up a website, drumming up support and crowdfunding, Woodford and a team of collaborators, began to turn this initial idea into a reality. Through the donations of nearly a thousand people, the initiative raised £75,000 for a feasibility study.

Bidwell Street is the first of THE PECKHAM COAL LINE’s spaces, a short piece of road, used mostly for fly-tipping. Throughout 2016, Woodford ran a series of events – from wassails to tea parties – to bring life to the space. Planters were built, murals painted and mosaics made and with each intervention a connection forged between place and people.

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It is this connection that is at the centre of the project:‘In a place like Peckham, lots of different people live in a small space but often don’t cross paths. Shared spaces are our common interest. We don’t feel that we have much agency but together we do, we have a collective power. If you can come together with other people and negotiate, then hopefully you can make something that works for everyone.’

The development of THE PECKHAM COAL LINE doesn’t simply make something where there was nothing, it reduces council costs as spaces transform from liability to community asset.

‘We see value beyond the economic, that’s a big part of it,’ he explains, ‘these places are neglected because often they don’t have a perceived economic value.’

www.peckhamcoalline.org

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THE PECKHAM COAL LINE won best community project at 2017’s London Planning Awards, but is not the only project of its kind with community-led schemes springing up across the UK. Woodford has set up a cooperative collective, Mesh Workshop, which as well as steering the Peckham project is part of the Mayor of London’s Special Assistant Team engaging in various transformation schemes around the capital.

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INTO THE FIRE Clay and the spectacle of outdoor firing in makeshift kilns combine in IGNITION, a participatory ceramic project designed to encourage handson making and community dialogue This ongoing project, part of the LOCAL ENCOUNTERS programme at Central Saint Martins, was devised

by Duncan Hooson, Stage One Leader on BA Ceramic Design. Across five groups, more than 80 local residents, business workers and community group members took part in a series of ceramic workshops. The aim was to offer these groups both formal and informal engagement activities that re-ignited the importance and enthusiasm for haptic skills and to encourage new social relationships and channels for community dialogue.

People from across the local community were invited to attend and make connections for ongoing conversations.

One of those was Eva, project manager at the nearby British Library and a volunteer at the local Camley Street Natural Park. ‘You meet a completely different group of people which is fascinating – all ages and all walks of life,’ she says about her local engagement, ‘I’ve never been involved in ceramics before so it’s been brilliant to get my hands on clay.

It’s also great to get behind the scenes at Central Saint Martins.’

All this making culminated in a collective kiln firing, to which both Camden and neighbouring Islington residents and workers were invited. The clay pieces were fired using a raku kiln, a traditional Japanese technique which involves placing the red-hot vessels into wood chips, encouraging raku’s trademark crackled surface.

Volunteers and clients from The Women @ The Well, a charity in King’s Cross for vulnerable women, both attended the workshops. Sister Irene had worked with clay before and returned to clay with enthusiasm: ‘It’s not just about the physical side of making, there’s the philosophy behind it.

It’s therapeutic. When you get the piece of clay under control, that’s a wonderful feeling. It’s deeper than one imagines, there’s more to it than meets the eye. It’s a journey.’

With future ambitions that include public access kilns across the local area, and with one already being constructed at the Skip Garden in the King’s Cross area, IGNITION is about connecting people with clay and making, but it is also a project that opens the doors of Central Saint Martins. ‘It’s all good saying this is an arts school, but what does that mean?’ says Hooson, ‘What goes on there? Local partners may say yes, but it’s about maintaining and building on these relationships. After all, these projects are built through trust.’

WITH THANKS TO THE IGNITION PARTICIPANTS: N1C RESIDENTS AND WORKERS AT THE SKIP GARDEN, CLAYGROUND COLLECTIVE, WOMEN@THE WELL, THE CAMDEN TOWN SHED, CAMLEY STREET NATURAL PARK.

Photo: Steve Mepstead

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‘I’ve seen the success of bringing people together around the community of firing – live kilns, live firing and people seeing the process.

Quite often the process, that transformation of clay through heat, is hidden. But with raku you can see it. IGNITION refers not simply to igniting people’s imagination but the flame of the firing’ says Hooson.

Look at Me, Steve Russell

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THE LOCAL LOOK A pilot initiative turns the traditional art gallery structure inside out. What was a closed space mediated by curators and collectors is transformed into the open-air Market Road Gallery inviting anyone to share their work as well as welcoming public opinion in response. The more loved the work, the longer it remains on the wall

A Central Saint Martins LOCAL ENCOUNTERS project, the Market Road Gallery was itself born out of longterm action-research that Willcocks was working on with artists, academics, urban planners and the police about the impact and value of graffiti. Both a response to – and legitimisation of – street art, the gallery invites and provokes wider audiences to think more seriously, speak more constructively and act more playfully through contested but creative actions, through street art.

This is not the first local project for Attic storage which has a strong track record, including supporting Hackney City Farm and assisting local food banks.

‘We feel that businesses generally could do more to engage with their local community and it’s not always about money,’ says de Ryckman de Betz, ‘small businesses can’t write the same size cheques, or spare the same number of man hours as larger outfits can. But what we can do is to find the smaller, more worthwhile initiatives that typically get overlooked and give them a boost.’

‘The Market Road Gallery is the gift that keeps on giving,’ he continues, ‘it will continue to change over time, with new artists contributing new ideas, and all the while

‘The Market Road Gallery is the gift that keeps on giving… it will continue to change over time’

the local community get to have a say in what stays and what goes. All the feedback we’ve had has been positive.

When I walk from St Pancras, I walk through Central Saint Martins now and it’s a lovely feeling because I don’t feel like a trespasser, I feel part of something.’

With initial funding for a year, the Market Road Gallery has more works to be revealed and more audiences to engage. As a pilot project for Willcocks it serves to inspire new paths to push forward his research into empowerment among diverse audiences within the urban environment, through creative and playful practices, undoubtedly inspiring future iterations. ‘Look at all the advertising space in the city, shouldn’t there be space for other people to offer their voice?’ he questions. ‘I’m passionate about people using their creative interests to make their mark on the urban environment but I’m not fixed on it being paint if that’s not what people want.

I’d love us to be thinking about what communities want and need and finding ways to bring about those changes. www.marketroadgallery.org

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A 65-metre wall that backs onto a series of sports pitches is the canvas donated by Attic Self Storage, a business just a walk away from Central Saint Martins.

Divided into seven bookable areas, the gallery opened in July 2017 and has seen over 30 artists cover its walls

‘When we opened our new store, we had the challenge of bringing an old, dilapidated building back to life,’ recalls Frederic de Ryckman de Betz, Director of Attic Self Storage, ’the rear of the building was covered in decades-old graffiti’.

For Willcocks, the project explores the possibilities of an agonistic practice: ‘You and I can contest each other’s ideas without being enemies.

So what does that look like in the built environment and in creative practice?

What does it look like for someone to put up their mark in paint on a building and if you don’t like it, you’re invited to have a go or make a suggestion?’

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‘There’s lots of ways to complain about your built environment, there’s not many ways to be proactive,’ explains Marcus Willcocks, Research Fellow and co-designer at the Design Against Crime Research Centre and initiator of the Market Road Gallery. ‘Often the complaints end up with the authorities and the positive reflections end up on social media. This project has been an ideal opportunity for different voices to come together to see how people can make public creative practice in legal but uncommissioned ways.’

eliciting hundreds of responses online through the initiative’s website. Work

by Boxhead, Caio Beltrão and Steve Russell, as well as collaborative pieces with local groups such as the photography club at the Drovers Centre (see pages 44-45), has been seen by a broad audience of local residents, users of the nearby sports centre and those simply passing by.

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HOW TO BUILD A LOCAL SPACE PROGRAMME Camden Council, the PUBLIC COLLABORATION LAB and MA Industrial Design students collaborate with local authority housing residents to alleviate overcrowding with affordable and adaptable furniture Central London is densely populated. This leads to a high demand for housing that drives up the price of accommodation. Increased costs combined with a shortage of social housing means that many families wishing to remain in their communities as they grow are living in overcrowded conditions.

In the borough of Camden, a high proportion of local authority residents live in overcrowded housing. Families outgrow their space but make-do: a living room becomes a bedroom at night, privacy is compromised and storage space is non-existent. There is less space to think, less space to be together and less space to be alone; what begins as a practical problem soon has social, psychological and health ramifications.

In 2015, as part of ongoing efforts to address inequalities in the borough Camden Council began a long-term project to tackle this issue appointing an officer specifically focused on

supporting overcrowded families. As part of this activity the officer collaborated with PUBLIC COLLABORATION LAB (PCL) – a research hub based at Central Saint Martins – and students on the MA Industrial Design course. At the core of PCL’s work is co-design, an approach that welcomes stakeholders and end-users into the design process. ‘You have to design ways for people to participate in a meaningful way... it’s about recognising people as experts of their own experience and finding ways to help them to bring this expertise to bear on the challenges they face’ explains PCL’s Principal Investigator Adam Thorpe.

The Council’s Overcrowded Housing Officer Rose La Touche identified 15 local families happy to take part in the project. By visiting each family in their own environment, La Touche and MA Industrial Design students began conversations about what issues they faced in their homes. These discussions could last for hours, with the complexity of problems becoming only too apparent, encompassing education, health and housing among others. Though initial ideas had been object-based it soon became clear that a communication aid was also required – a way for both the residents and the Council representative to identify

problems and initiate routes to tackle them, drawing on the resources available to them.

The MA Industrial Design students divided into two groups. The first created an activity booklet – a tool to structure conversations, to identify problems and seek to solve them.

Camden Council printed copies of the booklet and put them to use immediately amongst Council officers who come into contact with residents living in overcrowded homes. The second group took on the furniture angle. From the conversations with residents, they identified and committed to the alleviation of certain challenges, be it a lack of storage or little floor space or growing children and no privacy.

For the students, these projects took place during a ten-week period built into the curriculum, but real life does not stop when term does. The OVERCROWDED HOUSING project was therefore passed on to the following year’s cohort of students. With the initial issues already identified, the new students ran workshops with different residents to gather additional insights into their needs.

‘It was not like any other brief,’ says Elora Pierre, part of the second year of students, ‘we

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Photos: Liliya Galabova, Barbara Guoth, Elora Pierre, Zoe Kahane, Giorgia Rossi, Yin Wang

BEYOND SPACE PCL is focused on service, social and policy innovation and is an on-going action research and knowledge exchange initiative, originally stemming from an AHRC funded project conducted in 2015. Anchored in the strategic partnership between Central Saint Martins and Camden Council, PCL works collaboratively with a variety of organisations and community groups across the borough and elsewhere to co-design place-based social solutions to local challenges

LET’S SORT IT OUT! Tackling Waste Contamination to Increase Recycling Working together with council officers and residents of Kilburn Vale and Chalcots Estates in the London Borough of Camden, BA Product Design students explored how product design can make it easier and more rewarding to separate waste effectively.

‘Contamination’ – failing to separate waste effectively – is a major barrier to increasing reuse, recycling, compositing and reducing costs. If waste materials are not separated appropriately then they cannot be recycled cost effectively.

Demonstrating new ways of working with users as active participants to shape the future of services, rather than passive consumers, the groups of students and residents explored the issues and devised designs for waste disposal products that make it easier to recycle.

CAMDEN YOUTH HUBS As part of reshaping Camden’s youth services, the council looked to integrate service delivery to those young people in greatest need via a ‘youth hubs’ model. Working in teams, MA Narrative Environments students collaborated with council officers and young people affected by the proposed changes, to research and develop designs for ‘youth hubs’ that could accommodate the newly configured youth services.

The Camden participants received their new pieces of furniture, manufactured in the workshops at Central Saint Martins, but the OVERCROWDED HOUSING project continues into its third phase: opening the service to the public.

After several years and with the input of numerous students and participants, the project is reaching its most tantalising point and its future realisation is almost tangible.

A future in which residents head to a local making space to make a piece of bespoke furniture they’ve co-designed to respond to, and improve, their individual situation. ‘It’s something out there that is shared and everyone brings their expertise,’ reflects Thorpe on the idea of a community making space, ‘so, let’s go and do the stuff that needs doing to realise this potential.’ www.publiccollaboration lab.com

HEALTHY LIVING IN SOMERS TOWN Initiated by Camden and Islington Public Health and supported by Somerstown Community Association, St Pancras Community Association and the Living Centre this project brought together postgrad students from MA Narrative Environments, working in collaboration with local residents and community groups to explore the barriers to healthy diet and active lifestyles experienced by people living in Somers Town and St Pancras.

Their insights were shared with local residents via an exhibition at the Living Centre in Summer 2017. These insights have since fed into creative concepts to tackle the issue.

Some of these concepts are being developed into pilots in 2018.

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From their research, the students established that residents often felt their current ways of living reinforced a temporality of existence.

Could a system be devised to deliver entirely bespoke, adaptable, yet affordable, furniture?

It was clear that the furniture needed to be easy to assemble and so the students designed pieces that could be CNC-cut and slotted together without the use of tools. In meeting the challenges of tight spaces and bespoke sizes, digital technology continued to be the answer.

When space is precious, a table ten centimetres too large has a big impact, so the students created a digital platform that allows users to define their exact required dimensions.

The specially-designed digital platform empowering users to create bespoke furniture will be connected to a local fabrication-lab (fab-lab) or ‘maker space’ so the components can be cut quickly and nearby. PCL are currently in discussion with Camden Council, the King’s Cross Construction Skills Centre and local community groups to realise this final phase. The impact of such socially-engaged projects often extend beyond the original defined aims. Pierre found such fertile ground here that her graduating work continues to look at connecting local communities with maker spaces.

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were working with people, real people. As design students we are often in contact with companies or professionals in our field, but this was the first time we worked with real people and we were all surprised by the relationships we were able to create. The connections were always natural and insightful, which was unexpected.’

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REPRESENTING THE EVERYDAY Camden is one of the most diverse communities in London and the Camden Clinical Commissioning Group (CCCG) faces a particular challenge reaching its audiences. The stock photography relied upon for its communications on health issues and services is outdated; could a collaboration between local community groups and students of BA Graphic Design students readdress this balance?

The project drew inspiration from the Mass Observation Group, a radical film, photo and poetry anthropology unit founded in 1937 which aimed to build ‘weather maps of public feeling’ to help people understand and transform their environment by producing written and photographed observations.

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Five community groups affiliated with CCCG collaborated on the project, namely the Bengali Workers Association, Special Parents Forum, LGBT Forum, Camden Somali Community Cultural Centre and Camden Disability Action. Partnerships between student and community groups were set up and through conversation and collaboration they began creating collections of imagery. A challenge for students was to build trust within the partnership.

There was an automatic reticence for many to be photographed, but EVERYDAY CAMDEN wasn’t about a traditional exchange between subject and object, photographer and model. Instead, this was co-representation of a community.

Collaborators opened up their lives and places, sharing details and working with the students to capture them.

Eva Sajovic, artist and curator, mentored the two student groups working with the Bengali Workers and Special Parents Forum: ‘I believe it is important for the people to feel that they matter, that their voice matters and that their voice can be presented via those who have more access to the media. Citizens are silenced so much… and this kind of project can grow that confidence back.’

Such a working relationship takes time to forge. Across the six months the project ran, it was this relationship-building that took the time. Once a sense trust had been established, photoshoots were set up in locations important to the community groups.

The results will inform the commissioning of a stock image library for the organisation. ‘The images will help us ensure that our materials – from presentations and reports to websites – reflect local people,’ said CCCG’s Deputy Head of Public Engagement Martin Emery at the project’s unveiling.

Photo: Noah Petri

The project, called EVERYDAY CAMDEN, was led by BA Graphic Communication Design Course Leader Peter Hall and Photography Subject Leader Gary Wallis. Students began in early 2017, observing the area and taking street photography while taking into account the challenge of the brief: to capture everyday life, health and well-being without revealing the identifying features of any subjects.

Although, in true Central Saint Martins fashion, some students ‘broke the rules’ by getting permission from members of the public to take their portraits, eliminating the constraints of the brief.

It’s become a cliché of city life that neighbours go about their daily lives without ever knowing who lives next door. KNOCKS & SHOCKS sought to confront this, bringing together two educational neighbours – Central Saint Martins and the King’s Cross Construction Skills Centre Part of the LOCAL ENCOUNTERS Programme, KNOCKS & SHOCKS was led by Sarah Cole, a tutor in Fine Art, XD Pathway and artist Magda Fabianczyk, who specialises in creative projects with diverse communities – from refugees to those coming out of addiction. For this project, students from both schools collaborated on work to be featured in an exhibition at the Construction Skills Centre.

Before any creative action, the conversation had to begin. ‘We talked about sharing through making and also having discussions through making. We asked why we came to make work together, what decisions we took, what constitutes the two environments, and what problems the students encounter in them. Through a set of playful experiments, students took risks challenging the dynamic of both places. It was quite brave of them.’ recalls Fabianczyk. As a perfect example of the institutional and social barriers that can hinder collaboration, it was discovered that former students from the Construction Skills Centre had worked on the Central Saint Martins building during its renovation but had never set foot inside since its life as an arts and design college.

‘Most of them valued being able to work within very different environments to what they’re used to – ones that are so close to one another but don’t usually interact.’

All the students were challenged to think about why and how they work, to take ownership of the decisions they made and understand why they made them.

Interestingly, students were encouraged to rethink their first partnership selections as they are often made in the social awkwardness of initial meetings. Instead, Fabianczyk requested they forge more forward-thinking collaborations. At first, there were natural misgivings. The Fine Art students were used to taking the lead in partnerships, while the construction students expected to act as facilitators. For a true collaboration, these positions needed to be challenged.

In this context, both groups of students were exposed to different practices. ‘Both environments were restricted by a set of norms, but students would be subjected to different notions of them,’ explains Fabianczyk, ‘most of them valued being able to work within very different environments to what they’re used to – ones that are so close to one another but don’t usually interact. The construction students were interested in new encounters, play and material exploration, whereas the art students were interested in learning practical skills, such as brick laying, but they were also interested in exploring collective ways of making.’

Over three months, the pairings met on a weekly basis sharing their experiences of King’s Cross – it’s history, but also the current process of transformation. Some took inspiration from locally sourced

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First came the immersion stage, which references the co-design processes set out by Lorraine Gamman and Adam Thorpe of the Design Against Crime Research Centre.

From these workshops, each group began to understand the challenges and opportunities that each organisation faces, and the potential ways of working together came into focus. Tangible outcomes at these early stages included the deepening of local networks. Women @ the Well joined the King’s Cross Knowledge Quarter, bringing them into direct contact with neighbours like the British Library and the Crick Institute. The main strength of this process is that it is entirely reciprocal. For example, clients from Women @ the Well attended Central Saint Martins fashion shows and their experiences informed social design discussions in Graphic Design. The centre were more open to accept

At the close of the exhibition, the students reflected back on the similarities between the two groups rather than the differences and how working together can lead towards new and unexpected outcomes. One of the most exciting developments has been the enduring collaborations, as some pairings have continued their work together after KNOCKS & SHOCKS. This individual impact serves to highlight the need for institutional longevity, to build on the foundational relationships with more projects that bridge the space between neighbours. ‘It’s a longer process,’ says Fabianczyk, ‘there’s such value in the time that everyone gives. And from those individual connections, now there’s an opening for each institution.’ KNOCKS & SHOCKS set the foundations for another collaboration between both institutions, and this time it not only involves the students but also the staff of these institutions.

a partnership with Thomas Heatherwick studio since working with Central Saint Martins.

‘What I was surprised by was after the first visit it took on a life of its own,’ says Caldwell, ‘I was trying to control the methodology because of the sensitive nature of some of our discussions but I couldn’t and that’s been very positive. So, for the future, we’ve learned to slow down because people aren’t always on the schedule that we want them to fit on.’

Caldwell’s reflections support the position that these are not quick solutions or superficial relationships but instead the beginnings of long-term institutional collaborations.

‘We weren’t entirely sure what this project was about at the beginning but it’s worked well,’ says Cheryl Johnson from Women @ the Well, ‘I don’t think many people know that we’re here. When you connect to someone else it opens up opportunities for everybody. It’s not about getting people to do things for you, it’s about people understanding what it is we do and us understanding what they do.’ From these fresh insights, combined with stronger networks, comes Caldwell, Gresty and Wood’s resilient model for local partnership, and with it the potential to tackle real and complex problems.

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Part of the LOCAL ENCOUNTERS programme, CREATIVE CHOICES asks how institutions can make meaningful connections. The project builds the relationship between staff at Central Saint Martins and the Women @ the Well, a charity in King’s Cross for vulnerable women, with the intent of creating a model for sustainable local partnership. Run by Cath Caldwell Senior Lecturer, Graphic Communication Design, Emily Wood Senior Lecturer, Kingston University and BA Fashion Course Leader Sarah Gresty, the process began with conversation. ‘I knew some of the volunteers at Women @ the Well but because their work is unseen I didn’t realise just how close they were to college,’ says Caldwell.

Sam Chapman and Mohammed Khan formed a pseudo-archive of thoughts and property from the contents of an abandoned red suitcase that once belonged to the historian A. D. Harvey. While Kodie Harvey, Rachel Hinman and Chung Him Roy Wong created a large wall-less cube which dominated the reception area at the Construction Centre; visitors were asked to take part in a three-dimensional labyrinth game which included exposed electrical wiring.

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The redevelopment of King’s Cross has brought an influx of new residents and businesses into an area of established communities and organisations. How can neighbours step beyond their own walls and get to know each other in a meaningful way?

Academics spent time getting to know the charity, sharing stories and gaining each other’s trust. At the centre of this stage of immersion, was a series of workshops at Central Saint Martins which encompassed a wide range of activities from knitting to ceramics. ‘Nobody wants to have another meeting,’ says Caldwell, ‘but if we can offer a skill, it incentivises getting together and brings good will. That is what Women @ the Well do with their clients as well.

It is proved that making something together creates a non-confrontational level playing field and it helps people to talk.’

objects while others looked inwards to their institutions.

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ON THE ROAD In the autumn of 2017, M ARCH students could be found building a community bread oven and an information kiosk at the entrances to the Ruskin Museum in Coniston. These structures took a year to design, develop and construct, requiring many hands to make - both at Central Saint Martins and more locally at the sites in the Lake District The project, led by Spatial Practices tutors Takeshi Hayatsu and Gregory Ross, began in the autumn term of 2016 as the first-year M ARCH students were presented with the brief, to design and build functional structures across a selection of outdoor spaces in, and around, Coniston. The brief was open and students were encouraged to look at the material landscape of the area, returning to College having taken inspiration from materials such as slate and dry-stone walling.

Models for the eight individual proposals were exhibited in Coniston, inviting local interest and feedback.

Following this, a pair of designs were selected to be realised at full scale: Freddie Wiltshire’s bread oven and Billy Adams’ information kiosk.

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‘They were originally at a scale and an ambition that couldn’t be achieved in the time. Takeshi reworked the designs to make them achievable. At the end of that process, we had two sketches with no detail in them and it was all about everyone coming together across the course and communally designing these structures.

That’s been the really important part of this project,’ explains Wiltshire.

London and Coniston; everyone has touched it on the way,’ says Wiltshire.

Titled REWORKING ARTS AND CRAFTS, the project encouraged a re-engagement with the social reform of the Arts and Crafts movement. In the age of globalisation, climate change and development of digital technology, could the historical model of political and economic engagement, teach us anything about our lives today?

The project not only encourages students to explore the contemporary relevance of the movement, but also brought them into direct contact with its living history. John Ruskin, a central figure to Arts and Crafts, lived in Coniston for the last decades of his life and impacted the area in many ways.

For example, in 1874, he persuaded his students at about everyone Oxford University to help build a local road in an coming together effort to promote notions across the course of working for a greater and communally good, collective action and satisfaction through labour designing these (those taking part included structures. That’s Oscar Wilde and others who went on to become significant been the really social reformers). Both the important part of pleasure and importance of this project.’ making within architecture are undoubtedly at the heart of the two structures, The designs formed the basis of SUMMER from the initial proposals and SUMMER SCHOOL, an annual six-week building SCHOOL developments to the final consworkshop for M ARCH students. Structruction in situ. tures are built and rebuilt, material experiments take place in the worksLife for the bread oven took a new turn hops and detailing is trialled. ‘When in January 2018, when it was temporawe started SUMMER SCHOOL it was no rily relocated to Bruton for an exhibilonger our individual project it was tion at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. During everyone’s… and we got something much the exhibition run, it was lit and richer because of that’ says Adams. used for the first time. After the close Each student developed specialisms – of the exhibition, it was returned to through trial and error, building up Coniston to remain as a fully-working an understanding of material and probread oven for community use. cess to realise one particular aspect of the two structures.

The project has not only brought two structures into being for the local community of Coniston but has had Through funding from the Coppermine lasting impact on the students who Copper Project, copper was integraworked on it. Adams and Wiltshire are ted into the design as a cladding for now collaborating more formally, conAdams’ information kiosk. But more tinuing to employ collective making than simply clad the structure in within architectural practice as they copper, the students devised packs of head towards the end of their final tiles and tools to send out to local year. The duo is working on a project partners, asking each to create their in north London with locally sourced own repoussé design. Built from these materials and public clay tiling worcommunity contributions, the façade kshops as well as a planned return to of the kiosk takes on even more cothe Lake District to work again with llective meaning.

Grizedale Arts.

Once the majority of elements had been REWORKING THE ARTS AND CRAFTS wasn’t resolved, the structures were packed a re-creation of a movement’s past up and driven to Coniston along with but instead a reconnection to it; a a group of first-year MA Arch students project that celebrated local material overseen by Wiltshire and Adams, now in and history but also connected stutheir second year. ‘There was a great dents and community through making. moment when we were on site and it was raining, horrible and cold. The sun IN MARCH 2018 THE PROJECT WAS NOMINAcame out as people were coming out from TED FOR THE ARCHITECTS’ JOURNAL SMALL the village and they were pointing at which tiles they’d made. It’s been in PROJECTS AWARD. ‘It was all

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OTHER US: SOLAS Katy Shand MA Material Futures, 2016 The UN estimates that more than 250 million people could be displaced as a result of climate change by 2050. In the context of increased migration and ‘statelessness’ OTHER US is an exploration of the formation and survival of a future independent nation. In the second half of the 21st century humans have ventured onto the oceans to live in floating island habitations. SOLAS is a raft state located in the North Atlantic. The project explores the process of building a state and gaining the recognition required for long-term survival from established criteria for statehood: defined territory, permanent population, government and capacity to enter into relations with other states. This is used as a framework to create tangible future artefacts.

Rather than the practical survival aspects of life on an artificial island the project instead looks at the long-term priorities and financial incentives. It is a critical exploration of the implications of marginalising and isolating displaced people. www.katyshand.com

A STONE’S THROW Anna Tuhus BA Jewellery Design, 2017 Deriving from a wish to mend a world that seems to be cracking across its continental plates, A STONE’S THROW is a collection in which rocks and minerals serve as archetypes of countries and places called home while drawing upon traditional jewellery references. The rocks have been collected on journeys around the world, picked up directly off the ground and carried to London via different routes and for various reasons.

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Smashed and then reshaped and reassembled, the pieces are marked only with the coordinates of their origin. Together they acknowledge stories of travels and global connections, with their true value lying in the freedom to cross borders. www.cargocollective.com/annatuhus

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SHARED FUTURES Copenhagen-based future-living lab SPACE10 invited students at Central Saint Martins to design five speculative shared-living spaces for 2030 Henrietta Thompson, Editor-at-large at Wallpaper*, considers what they dreamt up The iPhone, Obama, Uber, Airbnb and Tinder: just some of the remarkable ways in which the world has changed in the past 12 years. Fast forward the same amount of time, to 2030, and who knows what lies ahead. But we can start to imagine by studying the challenges we’re facing now, the technology we’re developing today, and the solutions we’re starting to explore.

One thing we do know is that the global population is likely to hit 8.5 billion by mid-2030. The need to house almost a billion more people makes the creation of enough sustainable, well-designed and affordable housing one of the most urgent problems. One potential solution is shared living. Though it’s a relatively new phenomenon which is only beginning to find its feet, its efficacy is being tested and its future widely discussed. But while property developers, urban planners and corporations are all exploring the opportunities in earnest, these bodies are very rarely the end users of their own schemes. Where are the views of the people who might live in those spaces in the future?

To get the perspectives of those who are not yet ruled by a commercial agenda or jaded by government policymaking, SPACE10 collaborated with Central Saint Martins on a project to design possible scenarios for shared living in 2030. Over nine weeks, teams comprising two BA Architecture students, one M ARCH Architecture, and one MA Narrative Environments collaborated on their schemes. With a real site in mind – in Forest Gate, East London – a real user group of 16-24 year-olds, and real-world challenges to solve, the results are as intriguing as they are eye-opening.

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SPACE10’s Creative Director, Kaave Pour, explains: ‘Obviously London is one of the most challenged cities in the world when it comes to housing, its growing population is only exacerbated by the increasing isolation of its citizens and unmanageable rents and living costs. There is not really any institution in London more influential in this field than Central Saint Martins.’

Forest Gate was chosen as a sort of prototypical site for the future, as a place poised for change, with the Crossrail transport system and primed for development with a wide range of demographics within the existing and incoming communities.

Rather than simply designing a housing complex, students established a series of characters , fleshing out a day in their life, capturing their typical activities, social frictions and economic dilemmas. Aware that the young professionals beloved of property developers may already be widely catered for (as well as oversimplified as a demographic), many of the groups devised a collection of characters that embraced the diversity for which London is so celebrated.

Assessing the future and being realistic about it was challenging for many of the groups, who found themselves dismayed

Above: The Guest House, a shared-living space that integrates incoming communities on a local scale, Holly Le-Var, Janila Castañeda, Mark Freeman and Rafael García. / Top: CommunicARe, a shared-living tech hub designed to facilitate social interaction, Jennifer Nibbs, Morgane Sha’ban and Kara Andarini.

by the sheer scale of the issues and unknowns the world now faces. ‘It is natural to start catastrophizing and imagining the worst sorts of dystopias when you start to really explore what’s going on,’ says BA Architecture Course Leader Alex Warnock-Smith, ‘however, eventually we wanted to encourage a positive outlook – before we can build it, it’s vital to be able to imagine a world we all want to live in. And architecture and design can go so far in doing this.’

‘Before we can build it, it’s vital to be able to imagine a world we all want to live in and architecture and design can go so far in doing this.’

‘Ultimately it’s about opening up and communicating,’ says Pour. ‘We are only so many and with only so much power, so by sharing ideas we can hopefully also create more inspiration for others to do the same.’

After all, dream scenarios don’t emerge unless we dream them up.

THIS IS AN EDITED VERSION OF AN ARTICLE WHICH FIRST APPEARED ON WWW.MEDIUM.COM/@SPACE10

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WINNING WORMS Student duo Nina Cutler and Liv Bargman won the international BIODESIGN CHALLENGE 2017 in New York

not only natural, it reverses damage done to the ground through decades of heavy industry.

This project marks the first collaboration between MA Material Futures and MA Art and Science.

Given a brief of BIODESIGN AND THE ANTHROPOCENE, the student groups created projects that probed the potentials of biology and design to create a more sustainable future.

The resulting projects were wideranging but only one could be selected to go to represent Central Saint Martins at the BIODESIGN CHALLENGE in New York.

‘We made a conscious decision to do something different. We’re creating all these new things and new projects but what about what’s being left behind? Biodesign doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it can’t simply be petri dishes in tall buildings. We work in a world in which there’s already cultures and contexts and that became important in this project, to repurpose what’s already there, to turn that to our collective advantage.’ says Nina Cutler.

Nina Cutler, a student on MA Material Futures, joined forces with Liv Bargman, a student on MA Art and Science, to explore interspecies collaboration and the biodiversity of soil.

Researching the power of earthworms to bioremediate contaminated soil in post-industrial sites, the two devised potential systems to harness this particular process.

With their project ready, the two headed (complete with hard hats and miner’s overalls) to MoMA in New York to present QUANTWORM INDUSTRIES SYSTEM at the BIODESIGN CHALLENGE. After impressive competition from over 20 other universities across the globe, the Central Saint Martins duo took the top spot.

Eating the heavy metals on the ground, the worms become biological producers of quantum dots, a material used in nano-technology for photovoltaic cells. Visiting a disused mine in South Wales, Bargman and Cutler began to piece together QUANTWORM INDUSTRIES SYSTEM where mining communities could be re-cast as quantum dot farms in which worms convert toxic ground into useful material.

Current quantum dot production uses raw toxic materials and is not particularly sustainable. Cutler and Bargman’s proposed production line is

Carole Collet, Professor in Design for Sustainable Futures and Founder/Director of the DESIGN & LIVING SYSTEMS LAB at Central Saint Martins, is thrilled with the outcome of the challenge: ‘After fifteen years of working across design and science and implementing design-led STEM initiatives, it is great to see how a new generation of creative students can embrace complex biological scientific research principles and translate them into real world propositions that address key environmental challenges. www.biodesignchallenge.org

BIODESIGN, BACTERIA AND BATTERIES A team of cross-disciplinary researchers have printed living bacteria onto paper creating a two-in-one solar battery and solar panel

dry-surface media rather than in liquid media so it could, via an off-the-shelf inkjet printer, be embedded into everyday paper, making the result biodegradable.

Importantly, the process is scalable, opening up the world of future applications. Concepts for applications range from wallpaper that monitors air quality to The researchers, from paper-based health indicaImperial College London, the tor sensors that could test University of Cambridge and levels such as blood glucose Central Saint Martins, have in diabetes patients. ‘It’s shown that cyanobacteria not simply about the envican survive the printing ronmental but how an object process and were able to might connect environment to photosynthesise to create society and then the socieelectrical energy. ty to the user and then the user to ‘Cyanobacteria is ‘It’s not the environment. a source of enersimply about the These are the gy and nutrients environmental but three fields that as well as enviare important,’ ronmental purifihow an object says Sawa. cation. ‘It has might connect great application The project team’s for sustainability environment to make-up demonchallenges,’ says society and then strates the benefits Dr Marin Sawa, a the society to of collaborating member of the research team whose the user and then across disciplines.

‘My work is very PhD on the interthe user to the design orientatsection of algal ed,’ says Sawa, biotechnology with environment.’ ‘whereas scientifdesign was awarded ic research often

by Central Saint focuses on solving a problem Martins in 2016. within a specific field (and it has huge relevance in This emerging technology that specific discipline), of biophotovoltaics I wasn’t doing that so I harnesses the ability didn’t have to follow sciof photosynthesis to entific protocols. In that convert light energy sense it was a more creative into electrical energy. process, I could bring anyThe breakthrough on this thing from outside into the particular project was to lab and experiment.’ grow the cyanobacteria on

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ARCHIVING THE ANTHROPOCENE Helen Milne BA Textile Design, 2017 Humans are the single greatest accelerator of climate change. This project is a protest: a personally driven, site-specific, material exploration of air pollution, coastal erosion, and plastic pollution. Milne developed a visual and material language with yarn as its foundation, creating various textiles through unique, ecologically driven processes. One material was created using white yarn which was rubbed on vans heavy with the residue of air pollution, and another used iron and copper wire, treated with vinegar, which discoloured and eroded the fabric it was woven into. Milne’s materials are a metaphor for the slow and yet dramatic process of coastal erosion, and polyester and natural yarns are fused together irreversibly. As well as embodying the very symptoms of the crisis, Milne’s flags are calls to climate action. www.helenmilnedesign.com

SEA-MEAT SEAWEED Hanan Alkouh MA Material Futures, 2016 Eating meat is neither sustainable nor healthy, however there is a whole culture behind rearing, processing, and cooking meat that would be lost if we stopped eating it. SEA-MEAT SEAWEED looks at the industry behind pork production and consumption, and aims to replicate it with seaweed.

The project began with Dulse seaweed, grown along the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines, which tastes like bacon when fried. SEA-MEAT SEAWEED presents a narrative that follows the seaweed from farmer to butcher, keeping the rich culture behind meat production alive and preserving the theatrics of the trades. Alkouh designed the infrastructure of a transitional culture for a post-meat world, engaging in the social sustainability of meat production. There is already a system in place for the way we consume meat, and SEA-MEAT SEAWEED exploits that language but with an ethical and sustainable compass. www.hananalkouh.com

HIGH HEAT, LOW WATER:TOOLS FOR A HOTTER,THIRSTIER PLANET

www.lilytagiuri.com

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Tokyo, Miami, Sao Paulo, even London is slated to run out of drinking water in the coming years. The privatisation of water and the impending use of geoengineering strategies to combat the effects of climate change, mean that individuals are increasingly vulnerable to the interests of the corporations and governments investing in these technologies. Including a cloud-catching kite which gleans water from air moisture, a set of tools to cook and prepare food without water and a cloud seeder which induces rain through chemical injection, this series of tools offers a glimpse into the ways our lives will exist in the wake of climate change and the resulting power systems. ‘You only have to look up to the birds or the clouds to remember that borders are arbitrary lines formed by humans. While diversity of landscape and culture fuels my work, the fragmentation of nations prevents us from working together to address global climate, health, and social issues. Through focusing on natural cycles such as clouds (and water), my work addresses the shortcomings of borders and exposes the earth as a non-delineated whole.’

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Lily Tagiuri MA Industrial Design, 2017

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WASTE NOT, WANT NOT In 2016, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation challenged BA Product Design students to create a product within a truly circular economy.

Looking at plastics and packaging, students were tasked with considering not only the product itself but also its life cycle, transportation, consumption and final obsolescence.

To demonstrate just how broad the potential solutions could be, here are two resulting projects.

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The brief was set: ‘The natural world functions on a circular model; life and death help maintain a wastefree flow of information, energy and matter. Humans, however, have adopted a linear approach – we take, we make and we dispose – using finite resources and producing waste. This can’t work long term. It isn’t working now and it will only get worse, unless we change how we produce and consume.’

MCYCLE by Kaye Toland is a socially, economically and ecologically sustainable menstruation management service. It challenges taboos, shares ownership and completely closes the loop on menstrual products. Every month, MCYCLE delivers – by bicycle – organic tampons and sanitary pads in a box that transforms into a bin.

Once used and collected it’s composted into non-food soil for prison parks and football fields. MCYCLE is a co-operative company which puts control into the users’ hands and creates a local online community in which they can share their experiences of menstruation and their bodies.

Aathirai Muthu Kumar took a different route. Shocked by the fact that a million plastic bags per minute are consumed globally, often ending up in landfill, she decided to create a brief for tenth grade technology students to promote upcycling and sustainability. ‘It’s important kids are introduced to the whole idea of being sustainable at a much earlier age,’ explains Muthu Kumar, ‘especially in this day and age, it’s really important for children to grow up knowing what it is to be sustainable.’

Promoting learning through making, Muthu Kumar illustrated her project by spinning yarn from plastic bags and using it to mend a collection of broken discarded chairs. www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org

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The final selected trio of films – supported at every stage of the production by Nowness – reveal a breadth of approach, from a stylised production line and the story of a scavenged bicycle wire that becomes luxury to a pastiche about a designer duo who, in fact, are in the arms trade.

SUSTAINABLE FAST FASHION Jenny Banks MA Material Futures, 2017

2. Prelude Nicolas Canal Staut (BA Fine Art), Daniel Staut (BA Product Design)

The fast fashion sector satisfies the hunger of social media-savvy consumers by continuously replenishing its stores with cheap, short-lived clothing. It is important to step outside the ‘consume less’ paradigm dominating sustainable fashion practice to find ways for fashion to reduce its environmental impact but still meet its bottom line.

3. The Cycle of Pleasure (pictured above) Carla Benzing (MA Photography), Steffen Wendt Andrea (BA Fine Art) Julie Schroer (MA Fashion Communication & Promotion)

SUSTAINABLE FAST FASHION is a closed-loop garment production process that combines additive manufacturing and textile design disciplines. The result is a 3D-printing process that layers and binds post-consumer textile fibres to produce new versatile garments. More importantly, this digital technology is affordable and accessible to the mainstream consumer. Banks presents the future of our wardrobes in which durable basics protect us, while 3D-printed clothing allows us to wear fast-changing fashions. No waste, no bad investment, no guilt.

www.nowness.com

www.instagram.com/refabricated

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Encouraged to work in multi-disciplinary groups, across fashion, fine art and graphics, students were challenged by Nowness to devise a short film that creatively questioned the future of luxury and sustainability. Exploring the topic in an original and innovative way, the films were required to reframe a sustainable future as ‘not just necessary, but exhilarating’.

1. Art to Artillery Katarina Rankovic (MA Fine Art) Tom Cardew (MA Fine Art)

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LUXURY X SUSTAINABILITY

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Image: Carole Collet, Self-patterning mycelium rubber, 2016

THE OTHER WAY

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In her role as the inaugural CSM LVMH Director of Sustainable Innovation, Carole Collet introduces MAISON/0, an incubator of sustainable intelligence designed to provoke practices and challenge our collective futures. Here, Collet speaks about sustainability, design and THE OTHER WAY You have launched a symposium series titled THE OTHER WAY. Where did the title come from?

I’ve been thinking about it for a while.

I believe we need to embrace another way to address sustainable issues, one that is not led by technology or engineering but by creative practices. It’s often this ‘other way’ that isn’t taken seriously. Look at any government report – they never see design as a way to make a difference. THE OTHER WAY is more emblematic of how Central Saint Martins is pushing boundaries from a creative perspective. The first symposium was based on bio-design, but each one will focus on a theme, whether it’s social sustainability, circular economies or hacking manufacturing.

There are so many creative ways of addressing sustainable challenges.

These ways of thinking may still be ‘other’ to the norm but are we reaching a tipping point?

What is changing is that industry is starting to take a robust interest. David Benjamin, architect and founder of The Living, spoke at THE OTHER WAY symposium about his work with Airbus to design a new lightweight partition inspired by slime mould. This is groundbreaking: an engineering-driven company going

to an architect who works with biology to develop innovative solutions – in this case, learning from slime mould to design a 40% lighter partition for an aeroplane. Airbus works with world leading engineers, but it’s traditionally relied on physics, not biology.

It’s now realising that new sustainable solutions can evolve out of biodesign. So, yes, I think we’re at a tipping point when industry is realising it needs to explore the potential of biomimicry and biology, that’s where some of the most innovative answers are.

What are the barriers to these kinds of solutions?

Artists and designers are often seen as coming into a science context to express, translate, or communicate an idea. It’s still very hard to persuade people that a biologist and a designer working hand in hand at the onset of a project is where innovation can happen. Look at the work of our alumni like Natsai Audrey Chieza or Amy Congdon, creative collaboration is central to their processes and what they’re achieving.

You’ve launched MAISON/0 this year, what are your initial priorities for the incubator?

It’s a four-year programme focused on achieving both local and global impacts, so there’s a lot to do. This first year is about embedding sustainability across both the curriculum at Central Saint Martins as well as the design approaches at LVMH’s Maisons.

I’ve done a series of workshops to help students define an agenda and what issues are related to their industries. The question is, as a designer, where is your sphere of influence, how can you use your creativity to trigger change, and what difference can you make. Often sustainable issues can feel

overwhelming; I want to empower our staff, students and partners to feel that they can make a difference. The second year of the programme will focus on driving sustainable innovation within both organisations as well as beyond. There will be collaborative projects, of course, but also exhibitions, green trails, field trips, summer schools and masterclasses. The emphasis will always be on the power of creative practices to lead on sustainable innovations.

Your recent research has been based on mycelium…

Yes, within my research role as founder of the DESIGN & LIVING SYSTEMS LAB, I’m exploring the potential of mycelium as a new sustainable surface treatment for textiles. Using a range of nutrients – from coffee grounds to soya bean fibre – we can change how the mycelium grows. One of the most interesting developments is a self-patterned rubber material, the sample grew in a self-organised way with floral motifs on it. Who is the designer in this context? How much control can I have on the material? It’s funny because I hated designing floral patterns when I was training as a textile designer, and then behind my back, in the lab, the mycelium is creating floral patterns by itself!

What is your hope for the future?

Sustainability should be mainstream. It’s not a plug-in, or a choice. You don’t do a sustainable project and then a nonsustainable project; it should be built-in the same way that digital is now part of everything we do. www.arts.ac.uk/csm/collaborations/maison-0/ www.designandlivingsystems.com

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COELICOLOR: BACTERIA TEXTILE DYE Natsai Audrey Chieza MA Material Futures, 2011 In her TED talk – viewed nearly a million times – Natsai Audrey Chieza introduces her collaboration with the bacteria Stretomyces coelicolor:‘It’s an unlikely partnership but it’s one that completely transformed my practice as a materials designer. From it, I understood how nature was going to completely revolutionise how we design and build our environments and that organisms are going to help us grow our material future.’

Chieza, an MA Material Futures graduate, recently completed the first ever arts residency with Gingko Bioworks, a biotech company in Boston founded by MIT scientists. During the residency, she explored the possibilities of scaling up her artisanal practice and research into coelicolor as a textile dye. Working with the bacteria presents the challenge of collaborating with a medium that has a life of its own while offering a bespoke alternative to the toxic synthetic dyes used across the textile industries.

‘As we face this ecological crisis in front of us, what we have to do is determine how we’re going to build these new material systems so that they don’t mirror the damaging legacies of the oil age… biotechnology is going to touch every part of our lived experience; it is living, it is digital, it is designed and it can be crafted.

This is a material future that we must be bold enough to shape.’ www.natsaiaudrey.co.uk

ZOA™️: BIOFABRICATED LEATHER MODERN MEADOW Amy Congdon MA Textiles Futures, 2011 Biotech start-up Modern Meadow is using the tools of biotechnology to build a new world of materials, starting with their recently launched bioleather materials brand ZoaTM. These new materials are created using the essential protein found in skin – collagen – but grown completely without the animal. These adaptable biofabricated materials offer infinite design possibilities that, at scale, will have a lighter footprint on the planet.

www.zoa.is www.amycongdon.com

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Image: Modern Meadow

‘What really excited me about joining Modern Meadow was the chance to work on a revolutionary new material. To rethink what is currently possible and to push boundaries. My studies at Central Saint Martins supported me in continuing to develop the kind of multidisciplinary thinking that serves me every day in the lab working with scientists.’

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Amy Congdon, an alumna of MA Textiles Futures (now MA Material Futures), is currently finishing a practice-based PhD at Central Saint Martins with the DESIGN & LIVING SYSTEMS LAB, and in collaboration with the Tissue Engineering & Biophotonics Laboratory at Kings Collage London. Amy is also Team Lead for Materials Design at Modern Meadow. One of the most recent projects she’s worked on at the company is the first ever prototype using ZoaTM bioleather, which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art’s ITEMS: IS FASHION MODERN? The piece, a reimagining of the graphic t-shirt, designed by Chief Creative Officer Suzanne Lee and Amy, has just been acquired into the museum’s permanent collection.

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Work by one of the winning groups made up of six students. Photo: Honor Cooper-Hedges

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FUTURE LUXURY WITHOUT WASTE Rosemary Wallin, CSM Doctoral Researcher – ‘Sustainable Luxury’ and Pathway Leader on BA Fashion Design and Marketing, looks at an LVMH collaboration with sustainability at its core

‘Importantly, this

In 2016 when the ZERO-WASTE project began, we had already been working with LVMH on a sustainability project for three years. But like many sustainability projects, the focus had remained largely on up-cycling wasted luxury materials, provided by a number of LVMH companies such as Marc Jacobs, Loewe, Louis Vuitton and Thomas Pink. While the project had been creative and successful, I wanted to develop it to think in a more systemic way about fashion’s creation of waste in the first place.

Through my own doctoral research into sustainable luxury, I had been interested in the concept of zerowaste pattern cutting, pioneered by designers such as Holly McQuillan and Timo Rissanen, and I decided it was important to introduce these techniques to the Central Saint Martins fashion undergraduates.

to keep our curriculum

Zero-waste pattern cutting involves changing the way we think about the design process, so that the clothes produce little or no waste cloth.

Normally, the fashion design comes first, then the pattern is made, and then the pattern is cut from a length of cloth. ‘Lay planning’ is how the pattern is arranged on the length of cloth to produce the least amount of waste. Despite this, we as an industry produce 60 billion metres of waste cloth a year (i.e. this

project demonstrates that both research and knowledge transfer are vitally important relevant to industry, linking as it does, cutting-edge work in academia with reallife industry issues andcontexts.’

is the fabric left on the cutting room floor). By contrast, zero-waste pattern cutting employs a number of different techniques to create shapes, which use the whole cloth – treating it as the precious resource it is.

The revolutionary aspect of the ZERO-WASTE project at Central Saint Martins, was to combine it with the notion of luxury – an area we are beginning to specialise in. This was a team project with students from Fashion Design and Marketing (FDM) to design and make the clothes, Fashion Communication and Promotion (FCP) to create the visual communication and campaign around the concept and Fashion Journalism students (FJ) to create the narrative around the collection. There were six teams and each was given a luxury brand to design a capsule zero-waste collection for. The results were spectacular. In the first year the winning groups designed for Marc Jacobs and Kenzo, and the clothes, communication and marketing were so sophisticated that Alexandre Capelli, Group Environment Manager for LVMH, said that they were strong enough to go in-store immediately. Such was the standard, that the student designers were invited to show the clothes in a dedicated fashion show at the FUTURE LIFE, 25 years of LVMH environment event in Paris, which was a brilliant showcase for the students and their innovative work.

This year was the second year of the project and once again we had joint winners with the Fendi and Givenchy groups creating stunning concepts for

a ‘Fending Machine’ and a Givenchy cult complete with its own perfume.

Importantly, this project demonstrates that both research and knowledge transfer are vitally important to keep our curriculum relevant to industry, linking as it does, cutting-edge work in academia with real-life industry issues and contexts. The students become the creative link between the two, as a hot-bed for ideas, testing out new methods and processes in imaginative and often previously unthought-of ways.

For the students, it has been a wonderful learning experience. The FDM students learnt new pattern cutting techniques, how to work with digital print, and to work in a interdisciplinary team. All the group members learnt about sustainable issues through doing, participating and problem solving – themselves operating like small companies. I strongly believe that sustainability is best taught not in theory, but through practice, and I know that all of the FDM students in particular will consider the waste they produce in a different way from now on.

Similarly, LVMH plan to invite the students into some of its Maisons to present the ZERO-WASTE project to its design teams, showing that students can begin to affect the culture of the industry they have yet to enter. This is an extremely exciting outcome, not just in terms of their future employment, but also as influencers for a fairer and more sustainable future fashion industry.

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38 CAN GRAPHIC DESIGN SAVE YOUR LIFE? is the question posed by Rebecca Wright, Programme Director of Graphic Communication Design, in an exhibition she co-curated at London’s Wellcome Collection. From the Red Cross to pharmaceutical packaging, it looks at the public role of graphic design in health and medicine ‘Graphic Design in and of itself isn’t that interesting,’ says Wright as she explains the thinking behind the publishing house GraphicDesign& that she set up with Lucienne Roberts. ‘What is interesting is what it does in relation to the subject that it’s serving. It is a service industry for the public and it comes to life in that context.’

The discipline’s relationship with other subjects has been the focus for a series of books that Roberts and Wright have written, spanning religion, literature and mathematics. Most recently the duo alighted on health. A few years ago, they approached the Wellcome Collection with the book idea and after a couple of conversations the project had grown into an exhibition. A book accompanying the show has been published by GraphicDesign&.

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While the scope developed to include more historic examples from the Wellcome’s extensive archive, one thing remained crucial: ‘Graphic Design is not precious,’ says Wright, ‘the range of material includes things that many people will have used and even thrown away, things that we got from Ebay during our research. What we want to do is draw people’s attention to something that’s so easily taken for granted. Graphic Design is all around us, all the time, in both positive and frustrating ways but we don’t recognise the role that it plays.’

From advertising and packaging to public health posters and hospital design, ‘CAN GRAPHIC DESIGN SAVE YOUR LIFE?’ explores how graphic designers persuade, educate and soothe their audiences. Underneath many of the exhibits are stories of their real-world impact – from the alleviation of anxiety or the reduction in cigarette sales to the containment of an outbreak.

‘This is one the few facets of Graphic Design that everyone feels good about. Some would question if we should celebrate selling another product or designing another annual report but this is an area where we can all, as designers, point and our function”. It’s great to reveal some of that.’

And of the title? ‘It’s cheeky of us to leave it as an open question but we want to be provocative. We want the audience to think about that; although, we know the answer that we would give!’

Here, Wright talks us through a few favourite projects and exhibits: 1. We use smoking as a way to look at the good and bad of Graphic Design’s role in persuading behaviour. It was integral to the success and proliferation of brands like Lucky Strike and Silk Cut. When I was a student the question that was asked was

2. There is a joy that beautiful design can add to medical environments which are often austere and off-putting to anxious patients. There are some great examples, we’ve included Morag Myerscough’s bold work for the Children’s Hospital at The Royal London Hospital; Kenya Hara’s delicate signage systems and Stockholm Design Lab’s work for a series of pharmacies inside Swedish hospitals.

3. Graphic Design is not always about things looking nice. One of the great examples of its impact is Pearson Lloyd’s A BETTER A&E project. It’s a company that works across many design disciplines but its solution wasn’t about furniture or the service system – it was about information. Information in the waiting room so patients can understand why someone else might be seen faster or signage on the ceiling so while you’re in bed you can you can look up and take it in.

By informing patients you remove anxiety which is the cause of much of the negativity and can ultimately lead to violence. There was a 50% reduction in violence in A&E – that’s incredible!

4. Not all the work on show is without controversy though. We’ve included the letter-carved granite gravestone from DON’T DIE OF IGNORANCE, the AIDS awareness campaign in the 80s. The Tory government realised it needed public health action – there was almost a mythology of misinformation. A leaflet was sent to every household in the UK, but the strategy was fear and you can question whether that was an effective method because it also fed into a stigma. Having spoken to Malcolm Gasken, one of the designers who worked on the campaign, I can see how they thought it was the only option available at the time because they needed to make a population take notice. There was an urgent need to have impact.

5. The final choice is a chart by Florence Nightingale. This is a reminder that there was Graphic Design before Graphic Design.

It’s Nightingale’s representation of information, demonstrating that the majority of deaths of soldiers in the Crimean War were due to infection and not their initial wounds. It wasn’t about telling but showing and it directly affected nursing practice.

Too often we think of Graphic Design as the end of the process – the skin, the aesthetics – but it can also be a catalyst for change, it can be gritty, fundamental and extraordinary.

CAN GRAPHIC DESIGN SAVE YOUR LIFE? WAS ON SHOW AT THE WELLCOME COLLECTION, LONDON, 7 SEPTEMBER 2017 – 14 JANUARY 2018. www.wellcomecollection.org www.graphicdesignand.com

Andrew Meredith for Universal Design Studio

CAN GRAPHIC DESIGN SAVE YOUR LIFE?

‘would you design for a cigarette company?’.

There was so much well-paid work there, but the scientific evidence was incontrovertible.

Now, it would be a meaningless question.

It’s one of the few areas in which the influence of Graphic Design has been recognised. The World Health Organisation has seen that removing features from the packaging has been one of the most effective measures to reduce smoking. But designers love working with particular restraints, so alongside anti-smoking campaigns we’ve included speculative cigarette packaging – using the set of restrictions for creative opportunity: one typeface, capitals for the warning only, a set point size, no colours for the brand and the background colour Pantone 448, which was identified as the least appealing colour.

Paper elements for dialysis animation.

Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?

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DESIGNING FOR DIALYSIS

or two recipes but we wanted to create a platform that enables them to share that knowledge.’

of recipe cards based on recipes sourced from the patient community on the ward.

How Graphic Communication Design can encourage kidney patients to take creative control in cooking

Vital Arts and Central Saint Martins were awarded a collaborative research grant from Creative Works London to determine what kind of design intervention would improve patient experience on the ward.

Quickly, Vormittag realised what herself and the students on the Graphic Communication Design programme could offer was a format for knowledge share, a way to collect informal recipe alterations the patients had, up until then, navigated on an individual basis.

Fast forward to 2017, when Vital Arts was invited to work with TATE EXCHANGE, and the project entered into its second phase. Just a few days before World Kidney Day, Vormittag presented the project at Tate Modern to a collection of NHS dieticians, patients and their families as well as visitors to the gallery.

In 2014, Luise Vormittag, Lecturer in Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, was approached

by Vital Arts. The arts organisation for Barts Health NHS Trust suggested the Renal Ward at the Royal London Hospital as a potential site for a design intervention.

‘We approached the ward with one question: what kind of design intervention would improve patient experience? We had assumed it would be an interior design project, but really what people wanted to talk about was food. It’s such a focus because patients get so frustrated by it.’ says Vormittag

What emerged from the first phase of this collaboration was a set

While the project continues to be a learning opportunity for Central Saint Martins students, the ultimate hope is to gather together partners and publishers to make an entire recipe book a reality, to move from potential to impactful, to help kidney patients find creative agency in their cooking and reconnect with the pleasure of food.

MOM TOO: E-SEARCH FOR INFANTILE COLIC

Joao Gil MA Industrial Design, 2016

Elif Gengör MA Industrial Design, 2016

Welcome to the internet of bodies. BIOCOMPUTER goes beyond speculative design, offering the public an immersive experience of the future digitisation of healthcare. Humans are transformed into biocomputers connected to the internet in order to monitor and track the working realities of their bodies. Such consultation provides the haptic basis for an ethical discussion that moves from public to expert and from patient to scientist to policy-maker.

The causes of infantile colic are still unknown and though the condition is short-lived, parents often struggle to deal with the frequent and loud outbursts of crying from their babies. MOM TOO is a research service solution intended to find the cause of infantile colic through design interventions that explore various theories. Tools like an air-pressurised tummy massager, a back massager, an automated swaddle and an infant carrier can be programmed to perform soothing actions. They are activated automatically and the data is recorded through a smartphone app.

‘There are no solutions, no definition of beauty, no ultimate truth, utility or function.’ Joao Gil.

MOM TOO is a service that helps researchers discover the unknown, relieve parental distress and change the perspective of the medical community by proposing novel research methods.

www.joao-gil.com

www.elifgengor.com

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BIOCOMPUTER: FUTURE OF HEALTH INSTITUTE

Drawn from current advancements in synthetic biology, body hacking and transhumanism, this project gathers insights for future worlds by engaging with the public in an experiential consultation process.

Mom Too.

Feedback from dieticians, patients and supportive organisations such as the British Kidney Patient Association has been universally positive.

With each step, Vormittag and her students refine the facets of the possible publication.

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Biocomputer.

Patients whose kidneys are failing are treated with dialysis, a process that filters their blood.

Dialysis takes five hours a day, three times a week so requires regular trips to the hospital.

‘It’s an outpatient ward but everybody knows each other,’ says Vormittag, ‘there’s a collegial atmosphere. Patients exchange tips and tricks because the condition is what they have in common. Individual patients may know how to adapt one

Patients on dialysis have a very restricted diet, which makes it difficult to prepare flavoursome meals, and often those meals feel specialist and compromised rather than inclusive for a whole family sitting at a dining table. Non-white ethnic groups have a higher risk of developing kidney failure, and yet there are no recipe books available that reflect culinary and cultural diversity. Advice given to patients is often about what not to eat, the things to avoid, so this project sought to turn away from the prohibitive, to highlight the creative approach of cooking for such a specialist diet.

Alongside the recipes cards and conversations about diverse renal recipes, three MA Graphic Communication Design students – namely Eva Afifah Rd, Savannah Bader and Daniela Barbeira – worked on a stop-frame animation.

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PRISON BREAK Design Against Crime takes designthinking into prisons to develop resilience and empathy among inmates and create a collection of antitheft bags in the process The Design Against Crime Research Centre at Central Saint Martins first set up MAKERIGHT in 2015 – a groundbreaking design course for prison inmates. The first results, a series of bags with inmate-designed antitheft components, were sold at Sue Ryder’s shop in Camden with all profits going towards hospice and neurological care.

MAKERIGHT is unique not because it utilises the making skills of prison inmates but because it combines making and design skills. Over eight weeks, students create anti-theft bags from beginning to end with user profiles and initial concepts through a series of iterations and prototyping. ‘Design unlike art, doesn’t allow you to design just for yourself, you’re designing for another, it requires communication and empathy.’ says Lorraine Gamman, Director of Design Against Crime.

There is a sense of restorative justice in convicted criminals designing anti-theft objects, but it goes much beyond that. The inmates have natural creative talents even though such skills may have put to questionable use previously. Visitors to HMP Thameside pass a cabinet of makeshift weapons that have been confiscated from inmates. MAKERIGHT’s challenge is to redirect that creativity and resourcefulness into something more positive. ‘What isn’t displayed are the ingenious things they make to hold their ID cards, to arrange their photographs or unpick the television aerial to get more channels,’ says Gamman.

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Through initial collaboration at Unbox India with Praveen Nahar of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, the idea of the prison as a ‘creative hub’was conceived. Success in getting funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) followed and the first MAKERIGHT course took place at Thameside in 2015, with the subsequent educational materials tested at Sabarmarti Jail the following year, to confirm the programme could be successful in other prisons.

The MAKERIGHT programme is co-delivered by two Central Saint Martins alumni, Erika Renedo Illarregi and Pras Gunasekera alongside support from design graduate volunteers to facilitate workshops. Gunasekera, a graduate of MA Industrial Design says: ‘I’m interested in how we can use design to stimulate debate. I’m not interested in making products but in the process and what collaboration does for people.’ Gunasekera and Illarregi made their home at the textile workshop, becoming part of the everyday landscape at the prison.

A day within the MAKERIGHT programme includes a morning of sewing in which the inmates repair linens and fabrics, and build on their skills at the machines. The afternoon is when the designing takes place. The initial workshops dissect the various components of a bag as well as the creation of a user profile, building up

the persona and a scenario in which they are vulnerable to crime. Many of the inmates selected for MAKERIGHT are heading towards their resettlement, on the cusp of leaving the prison and one of the aims for the programme is to encourage empathic thinking.

‘This course is

In terms of process, MAKERIGHT emphasises the value of iteration.

Inmates are asked to create several ideas, to be flexible and open to the challenges that present themselves.

Within the sessions it is this openness and resilience that is hardest to nurture, but it is crucial to each inmate’s progress and is one of the most constructive skills for a life beyond the walls of the prison. ‘It’s a labour of love,’ says Gunasekera, ‘you have to be with them, you have to get them to let go.’ The process of revisiting and reworking designs is, for Gamman, a metaphor for something broader: ‘The notion that nothing is finished runs through MAKERIGHT: your life isn’t finished, you can change it.

That, to me, is the crux of it.’

now I know I can do

As leader of prison industries at HMP Thameside, Keith Jarvis says, ‘MAKERIGHT is a breath of fresh air…

Working with offenders on employment skills is not exactly revolutionary.

But what is different with this course is that inmates learn design skills

giving me a bit of a problem really.

Before I was just existing out there, so I didn’t care, something else with life and I need to figure out what it is.

I can’t go out there to do nothing and come back any longer.

People show one another more respect.

The atmosphere is completely different, to any other part of the prison.’

Sam, MAKERIGHT student

and knowledge that can be transferred to many aspects of their lives, not only for employment.’

As one delivery of the programme gives way to the next, MAKERIGHT sees some of its alumni become peer mentors for the new members. The initiative isn’t meant to produce a new generation of designers but nurture new skills for inmates to call upon when they leave prison. As Gamman says: ‘Worst case scenario, the guys learn to make bags and cushions. Best case scenario, they learn enterprise strategies they can take through life.’

As MAKERIGHT became established in the rhythms of the prison, Gunasekera says some inmates found a particular comfort in the space of the workshop: ‘I’ve had so many men comment that it is a peaceful space for them. If we have to close the studio for some reason there are men who don’t want to go back to the wing. It’s a very different environment. There might be moments when it doesn’t feel like a prison. Then Erika and I might unlock the door and you’re pulled back into knowing where you are.’

The first collection has been completed, from a tote bag with a simple, secure flap to a shoulder bag with a design that encourages the

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Photo: Vic Philips

wearer’s arm to be held against it for security. The designs were given inmates at Kilmarnock Prison to be manufactured, as its textile unit can more easily complete production runs.

www.designagainstcrime.com

Ganley hand-stitches the words of prison inmates onto badges, giving a voice to the invisible.

Her project began by researching the history of incarceration, visiting prisons, reading diaries as well as volunteering on the MAKERIGHT project and contacting current inmates.

Through letters, she asked questions, hoping to gain an insight into life as a prisoner in the UK today.

She was overwhelmed by the response: ‘They were so forthcoming. If you ask five questions, you’ll get five pages. And they’ll talk about details that you’d never considered – colours, textures and how those things affect them.

It was such an eye opener.

They were so open and just wanted somebody to listen.’

Wanting to make the invisible visible, Ganley set about creating a collection of badges. Made from paper and thread, they are beautiful, fragile objects with quotes emblazoned across them. ‘I guess I see them like a protest badge, a show of solidarity – you’re wearing somebody else’s words.’

Made out of everyday materials accessible in prison, Ganley likes the idea that these could be made by the inmates themselves.

Although there are statements about the commercial impulse now at the heart of many prisons – ‘Prison is good business’ says one – the quotations don’t always dwell on the negative. Looking across the collection, viewers will find the appreciation of access to education or the recollection of incidental detail. Ganley’s work is a prescient reminder of the pull to find humanity within the system.

‘My project was already underway when I worked with MAKERIGHT. Being able to go into a working prison had a huge influence on me. I had already started making some pieces and my dread was that I would enter the prison environment, meet prisoners, and then the project wouldn’t make sense anymore. In the end that didn’t happen. Instead, it reaffirmed what I was doing and where the project was going.’

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MAKERIGHT IS NOW UNDERWAY IN HMP DONCASTER. IN 2017 IT WAS AWARDED SECOND PRIZE AT N.I.C.E. AWARD. IN 2016 IT WON THE BRITISH COUNCIL INDIA-UK EXCELLENCE AWARD UNDER INNOVATIVE PARTNERSHIPS FOR COLLABORATIONS IN HIGHER EDUCATION, AND SUBLIME MAGAZINE’S 2016 BEST DESIGN INITIATIVE.

Lucy Ganley BA Jewellery Design, 2017

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Across three prisons and two continents, MAKERIGHT has taken many hours and many hands to come into being.

With the first cycle nearly complete, from design and prototype to production and sale, now is the time to celebrate its achievement and build on it for the future. Gamman says: ‘My plan is not only to democratise innovation and encourage inmates to work with their creativity, but also to take new types of people into prison.’ As Einstein said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” We have to take in different types of people and different types of thinking. It’s part of a slow revolution to change it.

SHOW YOUR SOLIDARITY

Darrell Edwards from Vinyl Projects London

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Photos: Rebecca Thomson

FROM PATIENTS TO NEIGHBOURS

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Creating more comfort and better wayfinding in hospital On the first visit to Thistle Ward at Newham Hospital, then-third-year BA Graphic Design student Rebecca Thomson caught glimpse of a woman walking the corridor, disoriented and trying to locate her room. ‘A staff member walking by was carrying trays of food,’ she recalls, ‘so he couldn’t point her in the right direction. I looked at the door and realised that I would find this confusing, let alone if I had dementia or had just come out of surgery.’

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The brief for the NEWHAM HOSPITAL project, run in collaboration with Vital Arts, was to tackle the homogeneity of the building, to create way-finding and a sense of comfort for patients. The ward was specifically for older patients, recuperating from surgical procedures and often suffering from symptoms of dementia.

The project began in 2014 with Graphic Design tutor Luise Vormittag who has an interest in socially-engaged practice. Vormittag, having worked with the NHS before, approached Vital Arts – an arts organisation for Barts Health NHS Trust, the largest hospital trust in the UK – to gauge its interest in collaborating. Vital Arts identified a ward in Newham Hospital for the project to focus on: ‘It was

a new-build hospital, lots of white walls which was a good start,’ says Vormittag, ‘but white walls in the NHS still have a lot of visual clutter such as hand wash, notice boards, health and safety signs, loads of things. So it’s a good challenge.’

‘If the designs

The students were invited to tour the ward, meeting both Vital Arts representatives as well as the hospital’s staff and patients. ‘I like taking people out of the College into other environments where they encounter other types of people, other types of concerns,’ explains Vormittag, ‘I want them to think about how they might implement design in those contexts, where people’s primary concern might not be for art and design, but where you could address a problem with these approaches.’

good solutions so we

While the designs are focused on the experience of patients, the staff are central stakeholders, so schemes had to avoid giving additional responsibility in terms of maintenance. ‘It’s important that the staff are excited about the work because they look after it, they need to take ownership of it,’ says Neesha Gobin of Vital Arts.

This was the first commission by the arts organisation for this particular hospital and perhaps more importantly it was its first time working with students. A few weeks after the visit, their proposals were presented. ‘It was a test really,’ Gobin recalls, ‘if the designs weren’t right we wouldn’t have used them but the ideas that came back were feasible and really good solutions so we realised two of them, instead of one!’

Rebecca Thomson’s design, the first of two to be commissioned, transforms the Thistle Ward into ‘Thistle Street’.

weren’t right we wouldn’t have used them but the ideas that came back were feasible and really realised two of them, instead of one!’

Each door is given its own identity through clear and colourful vinyls supporting way-finding but also offering a sense of domestic familiarity.

Thomson’s designs not only altered the exterior face of the door in the main corridor but also its interior side, meaning the scheme is extended into the patients’ own rooms.

‘The response has been amazing’ says senior nurse Dionne Daniel, ‘it’s a great conversation starter for patients, relatives and staff. The other day I heard a young boy say “grandpa lives in the grey door” and I knew that it was working.’

But Vital Arts didn’t stop there, as it commissioned another design for another ward. Jessica Hook and Florence Meunier’s scheme for Tayberry Ward at Newham brings the outside inside. Initially working on schemes inspired by bus routes and the local area, their vinyl design was expanded to include St Pauls and various other more famous London landmarks.

While such collaborative projects are focused on delivering successful outcomes for the client, they also reciprocate impact by shaping the experience of the young designers.

The NEWHAM HOSPITAL project is a perfect example. Since graduating in 2015 both Hook and Thomson have continued to work on socially engaged projects in the charity sector.

Hook in particular credits the project for her future direction: ‘It was such a different project – we were used to print or digital, but this was an actual installation, a bit removed from what we might typically think of as graphic design… It really helped me get into social design. I’m sure I wouldn’t be in my current position without the NEWHAM HOSPITAL project.’

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THE LEARNING PROJECT A collaboration between MA Narrative Environments, MA Architecture, and the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India Over two weeks in the spring of 2017, Central Saint Martins and National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad students worked together in India to design, fabricate and install interventions for the Prabhat Foundation, an educational charity supporting differently-abled children.

Team One focused on improving home life for nine-year-old Saniya, who has cerebral palsy. The team made small but sensitive interventions: a mirror enabling Saniya and her mother to see each other throughout the day as well as a set of cushions decorated with her favourite TV personalities. These functioned as objects to cuddle but also as dolls and encouraged other children to come and play with Saniya.

For the Prabhat Centre school, Team Two created climb-on and climbthrough benches incorporating varying textures, sounds and ball games, which build social skills through play. While one hole was big enough for children to climb through, the second had plastic tubes which could be taken out and played with separately. Each tube had a different sensory surface on the inside. The third section had balls – some of which had bells inside which made different sounds and some had internal obstacles so they functioned like small, handheld pin ball machines.

BEHIND THE WHEEL BA Product Design’s Nelson Noll has won an RSA Student Design Award for his innovative indoor wheelchair. CURVE is designed as any other piece of furniture for the home, a resolutely domestic object ‘I wanted to create something that replicated the feeling of taking your shoes off and putting your slippers on when you get home.’ Nelson Noll.

Beginning with a series of briefs, the RSA’s Student Design Awards challenge emerging designers around the world to tackle pressing social, environmental and economic issues through design thinking and practice. This year there were over 800 entries from 21 countries, with Noll awarded the Global Disability Innovation Hub Award for his design. www.thersa.org

The project’s outcomes brought enjoyment and dignity to young lives. Facilitating play between differently-abled and abled children, the interventions encouraged social integration and helped erode the stigma of disability prevalent in India.

‘Reflecting back, it was an enormous privilege to be invited into people’s houses and work with them in sensitive circumstances.

There are not many projects where students can see that they have made a direct and significant contribution to someone’s life but this was one.’

Tricia Austin, Course Leader MA Narrative Environments

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Through an initial focus on speed-racing, Noll’s research put him in touch with a group of athletes including multi gold-medal winning Paralympian David Weir. Through these discussions, Noll discovered that even at such a high level of specialisation they use their older wheelchairs for indoor use only. This inspired Noll to create a chair designed specifically for domestic use with three wheels for a narrow pivot point and a higher seat base to access heights around the home (traditional wheelchairs are lower). CURVE is made from low cost, easy-to-produce materials: CNC-milled plywood, a pre-fabricated seat shell, 3D printed castor wheels and a pressed steel hinge which is the only part requiring larger scale manufacture.

Team Three worked with Devika, an 11 year-old with cerebral palsy.

Having researched her needs the team developed a play dome with elements that would enable Devika to exercise her grip in different ways and also attract other children to come and play with her (pictured left). The issue of integration and acceptance of differently-abled children was one of the key concerns of the Foundation. They designed a trolley extending Devika’s mobility, a washing system to empower her in her washing routine and make bathing more fun.

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Both have a distinctive fashion style – today Josiah is in a bright baggy playsuit and yellow glasses while Liang is sporting multipatched harlequin trousers.

This is what drew them together drew them together for the AIR STUDIO project.

‘She was the only one who crossed my eyes,’ says Liang who had been working on 3D installation and sculpture.

Josiah was also single-minded about picking Liang as her collaborator, but for rather different reasons: ‘I was thinking about which kind of person I’d never worked with.

The only Chinese people I’d met were in the fish and chip shop when I was a child in Highbury Quadrant.’

The synergy worked perfectly with the pair meeting regularly at Holloway Road Costa. ’I wanted to challenge conceptual art and for the piece to speak for itself,’ says Josiah who did a foundation art course years ago.

Photo: Chris Stokes, West Creative Ltd

THE CREATIVE COUPLE On paper Sheona Josiah, 54, and Zi Liang, 26, are worlds apart. Islington-born Josiah is a regular at Age UK Islington’s Drovers Centre, which she reaches with the aid of a wheeled walker decorated with handmade colourful dolls. While Liang, from Qiqihar in China, is a second-year student at Central Saint Martins.

But a project pairing fine art students and older people brought them together

and I shared what it was like coming from a big family,’ added Josiah (who is one of six sisters and five brothers).

The pair also dressed up in eye-popping outfits topped with giant papier-mâché heads – a hit when they wore it at the project’s opening exhibition at Conway Hall.

‘We had a lot of laughs as the barriers were broken down allowing the art to grow,’ says Josiah who is immediately hugged by Liang.

He then adds: ‘I had a lot of misconceptions about elders. I thought they would be lonely. But being an artist you have to think not only about form and content but also the responsibility you have for society.’

‘I had a lot of misconceptions about

Josiah’s advice for anyone working in an art they would be lonely. partnership is But being an artist to be patient, open and listen. you have to think not ‘When I was his only about form and age I thought old people moan content but also the and they always responsibility you say “When I was have for society.’ young…” I wanted Liang’s concern Zi to know that about the lack I was just as of support for elder people zestful as I always was. In inspired the pair’s artwork. my mind I’m 21! And it was Together they went to the good to learn what it was weekend flea market held at like for a young person, Grafton School where they to hear about going bought a walking stick, to university and the bicycle handlebars, wooden financial side.’ basket and some old toy wheels. ‘For this piece we ‘We put ourselves in each used duct tape to create our other’s shoes,’ adds Liang walking wheeler. We didn’t who plans to bring Josiah want to make it stable some Chinese presents after because the Government the university holidays. doesn’t do enough for the ‘A motorbike?’ she quips older people,’ says Liang. hopefully before adding, ‘I’ll miss Zi – there wasn’t ‘We talked about ideas enough time.’ and our lives. It was so insightful when Liang THIS IS AN EDITED EXTRACT OF explained about the single AN ARTICLE FIRST PUBLISHED IN child culture and the GET TOGETHER ISLINGTON. pressures to succeed that you have as an only child, www.gtislington.com elders. I thought

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MADE FROM MEMORY A 2015 study conducted by the Alzheimer’s Society, revealed that there are currently 850,000 cases of dementia in the UK, with numbers set to rise above one million by 2025. Over 225,000 people will develop dementia in the coming year. For perspective, that’s one new case of dementia every three minutes. Despite these worrying figures, the UK invests a mere 5% of its total health budget on mental health conditions

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BA Graphic Design students Daragh Anderson, Jordan Smith and Ollie Pearson each have encountered dementia personally and so in 2016 collaborated on a project to raise awareness for what is often an invisible illness.

Members of the public were invited to write down their most valued memories on Post-it notes, and to consider what it might be like if that memory was taken away. With over 1,500 participants in 24 hours and the Post-its gathered on the wall, the trio began to see them as pixels forming the word ‘Remember’. From this initial installation, they designed a typeface, REMEMBER.TTF, using the pixellation to create dissolving forms symbolic of memory’s disintegration and loss. Along with the typeface, the project resulted in film, gifs and images shared across social media.

REMEMBER.TFF WON THE MONOTYPE AWARD AT THE 2017 D&AD NEW BLOOD AWARDS.

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THE STONEBRIDGE PEOPLE LIBRARY Julie Howell MA Narrative Environments, 2016 As Greater London has 23,000 people per square mile, it is difficult to imagine how anyone could become lonely or disconnected in such a crowded city.

Yet social isolation is increasing, as are its social and financial costs.

THE STONEBRIDGE PEOPLE LIBRARY aims to reconnect the isolated residents of London’s Stonebridge Estate with their community. Through a series of interventions, the estate became moved to engage with its lonely residents, especially its elders. One such intervention connected the lighting of residents’ homes to their breathing, providing a visible and visceral reminder of those living within the estate.

The culmination of the project is THE STONEBRIDGE PEOPLE LIBRARY, a community facility containing the collected images and stories of local people. Users can access their neighbours’ contributions and connect with them. The aim is to place residents’ collective wealth of experience back into the community and to inspire and change the memory of the area for every resident.

WALL TO WALL In 2016, Matthew Wang, then a second-year BA Fine Art student, won the annual commission for the BIG WHITE WALL, a project that invites students to cover a large expanse of wall in the atrium of Central Saint Martins.

This commission opened up a new practice for him, one that was decidedly public and two-dimensional.

the camera, the group took portraits of each other’s hands, building up a series of imagery at once personal and anonymous.

The final piece made its home on Market Road in July and remains there until the next intervention is suggested for. Collaboration continues within Wang’s work, but stands in contrast to his individual practice; so, what is it about collaboration that has him returning time after time?

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Fast-forward a year and Wang has completed a wall piece for ‘I’ve been thinking about a local school playground as that question a lot. Underwell as a spot on the Market neath there’s the debate Road Gallery, a local openabout what it means for an air gallery that invites anyartist to enter a one to make their community. Does mark on a series ‘You try to be there the community of walls in Camden as an equal and not need you in the (see page 21). first place? Does as a white knight to it make a differFor the Market save the community. ence if you’re Road Gallery, Wang They had a lot more invited by the collaborated with community or if Age UK Islington, to teach me than I had you stepped in? a charity he’d to teach them. My role It’s easy to work worked with before with groups with and whose Drovwas reactive, winding the intention er Centre is only through any gaps that to “do good”. a few minutes’ opened up.’

Drop in, create walk away from the an intervention site. Joining the and walk out. photography club, The people who live there the group met every Wednesday have to bear the consequencto devise a design for the es while the artist can move 65-meter-long. on to the next thing. At an ethical level, there’s a lot ‘You try to be there as an to be unpicked but one aspect equal and not as a white of socially-engaged practice knight to save the community. is a desire to be situated, They had a lot more to teach accepting the situated nature me than I had to teach them. of work...There’s something My role was reactive, winding humbling about being with through any gaps that opened people from different disup.’ says Wang. ciplines, who live different lives. It reminds me that I Accommodating people’s retdon’t live in a bubble.’ icence to stand in front of

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HOME AND BELONGING IN HARLESDEN

‘All these participants, hopefully they won’t be with us next year,’ says Gabriel Parfitt, Arts Co-ordinator at homeless charity Crisis, during a textile workshop.

It’s an observation that seems odd until he continues: ‘We want them to be housed and in employment. Many of us have worked on formalised programmes before and you want those who start it to finish it but this is a very different way of running a project.’

with. People have instant connections but it has the potential to become really sophisticated.’

HOME AND BELONGING is a bespoke arts programme for clients of Crisis Skylight Brent, with the aim of improving the wellbeing of the homeless and vulnerably-housed residents in the area. Harlesden in Brent is in the top 5% most deprived areas in the UK, with housing insecurity a key issue and the second highest homelessness rate in London.

A long-term resident and Course Leader of BA Textile Design, Anne Marr has witnessed how recent developments in neighbouring Park Royal and Cross-Rail at Acton have had a local impact.

‘The idea was to offer people different options of textiles. We thought people would dip in and out but they loved it so much we couldn’t get rid of them!’ says Marr, ‘The clients returned again and again, and Crisis even kept the workshop open an extra day a week for participants to continue working on their projects.’

Through initial conversations with Crisis Skylight Brent in 2016, Marr found it had no arts provision for its clients and set about creating a collaborative project and securing funding through the Brent Council Voluntary Sector Initiative Fund. HOME AND BELONGING was designed as a 12-week programme of workshops both to improve mental health but also offering a space for participants to respond to the changing nature of the neighbourhood.

Textiles was a perfect material fit. ‘Everyone has a connection with textiles,’ explains Marr, ‘It’s easy to begin manipulating and working

Weekly workshops, delivered at Crisis Skylight Brent, were focused on ideas of mapping and expressing personal journeys but in terms of technique they moved quickly to encompass a wide range of processes – from weaving and upcylcing to digital photography and heat-press transfer.

To get some measure of engagement and impact, Marr asked clients to express their mood at the start and the end of each session using emojis. Though simplistic, this mechanism made clear the positive impact of each session. The nature of clients’ situations means that often regular attendance is not possible and yet HOME AND BELONGING attracted a committed group of 25 members.

As the weeks went by, the room which had been sparse and magnolia became a plethora of colour and creativity with workshop developments pinned up, covering every inch of wall space. Activity didn’t stop at the Crisis centre either as pop-up shops took place in both Harlesden and the Central Saint Martins building on creating a sense of social cohesion as well as public awareness.

Participants’ work ranged widely from

t-shirts emblazoned with statements like ‘Messy by Design’ and ‘Do it with Passion’ to abstract weaving and reupholstered chairs.

Beyond these objects, there were plenty of developments that were less tangible; all of the participants who responded to the feedback forms noted an improvement not only in their self-esteem and motivation but also their relationships with others. At the end of the programme, one participant was considering enrolling on a creative BTEC course.

‘I didn’t have any genuine expectations. I had no idea. The very nature of our members at Crisis is that many have no art training whatsoever and I’m absolutely overjoyed that we produced something so great and I’ve been astonished how much impact it’s had’, said Parfitt.

The initial plan was for a two-year project that would set in motion a sustainable arts programme at the centre. Remarkably, with the combined dedication of Marr and Parfitt that happened before the first year was finished. The second year will bring a new cohort of participants as well as a new series of techniques and creative challenges for them to experiment with. ‘We are an art college and we want the workshop participants to be unafraid of expressing themselves. I hope we have given them carte blanche to be themselves.’

As the project reaches its halfway mark, Marr reflects on the impact not only of HOME AND BELONGING on its participants but the importance of working beyond the walls of the College: ‘We need collaborators in order to be part of something bigger.’

Each year, BA Ceramic Design students collaborate with organisations beyond the walls of the College. Often, these collaborators are commercial enterprises – design companies, manufacturers or retailers – but 2017 was different. Instead, students explored the power of the ceramic material and its possibilities for social impact working with five charities and social enterprises. We talk to Stage Two Leader, Emma Lacey about the results and resonances of this year’s projects ‘Most clients wanted to see what we could do,’ says Lacey of the initial briefs set by the clients – namely, Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, UCL Dementia Research Centre, Studio3Arts, Global Generation Skip Garden and Hands Inc. For some, this was their first time collaborating with students and so instead of prescribing the desired outcomes, the projects often began with conversation and exploration.

Some projects resulted in public workshops and community engagement.

For example, at Dalston Eastern Curve

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS Pamela Yeow, Course Leader of the innovative Central Saint Martins/Birkbeck MBA explains why the world needs another MBA, one that’s jointly developed and collaborated on with an art and design school

market and is intended to appeal to a wide range of potential students, some of whom never previously considered a business school education.

Collaborating with arts organisation Studio3Arts began as a more traditional brief: to create gifts for Studio3Arts’ supporters to mark its 30th anniversary. Spending time at the organisation’s home at the Gascoigne Estate, the students decided against creating a onesize-fits-all object, instead wanting to echo the many voices and connections they had experienced. Across 120 vessels, 30 different glazes and three clay bodies the broad creativity reflected that of the client.

One of the threads that recurs throughout each project is the nature of clay to reflect individuality. How, in one context, the material can be standardised and repeated and in another it can be unique and expressive.

One of the threads that recurs throughout each project is the nature of clay to reflect individuality.

Our vision for this MBA is that together, we will develop a new generation of

As expected, our students come from a myriad of industries, with an average work experience of nine years. What they have in common is an eagerness to bring about fundamental innovation and systemic change, rather than incremental refinement. The emphasis is on positive transformation and a socially-motivated desire to change the world and we feel strongly that such passion can lead to catalytic transformation of business challenges.

Srikant Datar, David Garvin and Patrick Cullen called for rethinking the MBA in their 2010 book of the same name. They identified eight unmet needs: gaining a global perspective, developing leadership skills, honing integration skills, recognising organisational realities and implementing effectively, acting creatively and innovatively, thinking critically and communicating clearly, understanding the role, responsibilities and purpose of business, and understanding the limits of models and markets.

The Central Saint Martins/Birkbeck MBA tackles these needs through projects that not only encompass business and management theory and knowledge but

authentic leaders who truly care about what they are trying to achieve, be it in a large multinational corporate, or a small but beautiful social enterprise.

‘I think that was the difference between this client project and the previous ones. It’s not about function and design directly instead all the projects wanted an expression, a voice for the people they were researching and representing.’

remove them from silos, thereby extending the students’ understanding of these complex problems.

For example, our first ever cohort of MBA students has been tasked by Crisis, the UK’s national homelessness charity, to explore how employers can help people with experience of homelessness. How can people struggling with homelessness access jobs in a competitive market?

Our vision for this MBA is that together, we will develop a new generation of authentic leaders who truly care about what they are trying to achieve, be it in a large multinational corporate, or a small but beautiful social enterprise.

These will be compassionate leaders who will know why they wake up every morning to do what they do, and treat their employees and partners with humanity, trust and respect. They will respect knowledge and expertise and not undermine them just because they voice a different opinion or view.

Our MBA graduates will leave the course with a clear vision of what they wish to achieve (or may even be halfway there). There should not be a mutually exclusive situation where doing good socially cannot equate to doing well financially.

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Our MBA was developed in response to the increasing demand for creative and critical approaches to commercial and social enterprises that anticipate and lead positive change.

There is an explicit intention for this course to be a disruptive innovation within the existing MBA

Other collaborations exploited clay’s expressive qualities. Students working with the CREATED OUT OF MIND project at the Wellcome Collection Hub, interpreted the experiences of people living with dementia into a series of clay vessels – each one personal and distinct from the next (pictured below). The vessel is also used in the HANDS INC project. Working on the charity’s RECLAIM THE MENOPAUSE initiative, the brief focused on dispelling the negative connotations of the universal female experience. The resulting vessels not only represent women’s unique body forms but it is

hoped they will become family heirlooms passed from one generation to the next – a place to hold, and encourage the sharing of menopause stories.

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There has been significant critique of MBAs in recent times, particularly after the financial crisis of 2007-2010. Articles have been written about public perceptions of the crisis including accusations around greed in a highly capitalistic world and the development of the selfish individual corporate. Further critique has mounted around the bewildering number of MBA courses, from practically every part of the world and the perceived extortionate costs of such courses ranging from mid-four figures to near-six figures.

Garden – a much-used green oasis in London’s East End – the students combined conversation and clay sculpting to uncover the feelings of the Garden’s users. With the site facing redevelopment by the local council, the project required empathy: ‘They were clear that they didn’t want us campaigning on their behalf – it was a sensitive discussion of which they were in the middle but they wanted to reflect on the values of the garden’. The resulting is a show-stopping large pot is inscribed with the voices – some whispered, some shouted – of visitors.

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WHAT CAN CERAMICS DO?

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THE PICTURE OF HEALTH Paintings in Hospitals is an organisation that aims to improve healthcare environments by filling them with art. As part of the organisation’s ART IN LARGE DOSES project, students from BA Culture, Criticism and Curation curated an exhibition for the waiting room at King’s College London NHS Health Centre, drawing from the Paintings in Hospitals collection

Tell us your ideas for the exhibition NATURE CALLS. Joel Thompson: For me NATURE CALLS was all about not taking the brief too seriously and injecting a little bit of fun into the space.

The first thing that strikes you as you walk into any NHS waiting room is how stark and bland they are, so I wanted to juxtapose that with something more natural and wholesome that would hopefully bring a smile to people’s faces.

Markas Klisius: It was meant to be a space that detaches you from London and brings you to a place associated with peace and warmness.

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What drew you to the artworks you selected?

JT: The artworks we chose all had subject matter that focused on nature and utilised greens and blues. It was important for us that the works weren’t seen as disparate pieces scattered around the space, so in order to create a cohesive environment we chose pieces specifically because they build a calming, soothing narrative.

How does curating works for a hospital differ from curating for a gallery?

JT: It differs hugely in that so many other factors come into play. Firstly, there’s another institution (the NHS) in the mix, so that slowed the process down a little when communicating. Then we had to be careful about health and safety and sticking to legal guidelines. Most prominent for me though was how our usual concept of audience changed. This isn’t an exhibition for people specifically going to see art, it’s for a whole variety of people who are vulnerable and going to the health centre, so that really changed the tone of the project and how we approached it.

What do you hope people will take away from the exhibition?

JT: The NHS waiting room we worked with is one of thousands of, quite frankly, pretty drab, awful spaces around the country. I hope that the interactive nature of the exhibition cheers people up a bit and demonstrates that these spaces can change. There’s no real need for these spaces to be so grey and boring, all you need is a quirky idea and a bit of elbow grease.

MK: I hope that the space allows people to breathe a bit easier. The works are there to compliment the space, not to take over.

At the end of the day, it is still a health centre, not an art gallery.

What do you see as the main role of art in healthcare today?

JT: People are much more aware today that health isn’t a strictly clinical concept, it’s about all areas of life and looking after yourself emotionally, not just physically.

That, for me, is where art comes in; people have always used art as an outlet for their emotions, and as a springboard for ideas.

MK: I don’t have a clear answer to that but people should continue experimenting within these spaces and bring these two worlds together. Art in many cases explores in depth one’s inner state, and it should also help one to find peace within oneself. Art can be a safe space but with government cuts to arts education in schools, Brexit and the tensions within our communities, it is important for our generation to emphasise the importance of self-expression and for future generations to speak out on these issues through art.

NATURE CALLS – CURATED BY SUMIN CHO, MARKAS KLISIUS, YUXIAO LUO, YELINE MEHAJI AND JOEL THOMPSON – WAS ON SHOW FROM NOVEMBER 2017 UNTIL MAY 2018. www.paintingsinhospitals.org.uk

THE MIND’S EYE Anna-Maie Southern BA Textile Design, 2017 Southern’s work highlights issues of mental health and well-being by placing your mind on your sleeve.Inspired by art therapies and the Surrealists’ instinct to represent the subconscious, the fabrics incorporate real-life experiences of young men suffering from hallucinations and delusions. Through an online survey, Southern asked people to anonymously share their mental health experiences, specifically the connected imagery or visions.

The fabrics are made specifically for garments, ‘it’s wearing your heart or your mind, on your sleeve,’ Southern explains. Much of her motivation is to remove stigma, in the hope that by sharing people’s experiences we see how these thoughts aren’t outliers but instead part of the patchwork of human life. Revealing imagery which reoccurs again and again across people’s experiences, THE MIND’S EYE hopes to reduce social isolation and stigma.

MUSEUMS ON PRESCRIPTION

MUSEUMS ON PRESCRIPTION project was led

by UCL and wanted to explore the potential of museum visits to improve the mental health of older audiences.

Judy Willcocks, Head of the Museum & Study Collection at Central Saint Martins looks back on a cross-institution project connecting older people at risk of social isolation with museums to improve health and wellbeing

We worked with colleagues at UCL to recruit 11 participants from Camden and Islington and design a series of ten weekly workshops that would provide opportunities for self-reflection, relaxation and emotional engagement. The Museum team did a training course on working with vulnerable adults and met with people who had already delivered socially prescribed workshops which helped to frame the way our programme developed.

In 2016 the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection took its first tentative steps in the world of social prescribing as part of the MUSEUMS ON PRESCRIPTION project. Socially prescribed activities are a low-cost alternative to medication or therapy, offering opportunities to take part in creative, physical or learning activities that improve well-being. The

The workshops were designed to introduce participants to different art and design practices and many involved

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DEMENTIA SIMULATOR Di Peng MA Industrial Design, 2016 Dementia is a difficult disease to understand. Those caring for dementia sufferers, be they family members or healthcare professionals, may struggle to appreciate how the disease can affect everyday experiences.

The DEMENTIA SIMULATOR provides a way to experience a variety of the disease’s symptoms, not only engaging empathy but also offering the user a route to reflect practically on future care.

While no one can truly step into the mind of another, the virtual reality headset creates an immersive environment that affects the senses.

Users encounter distorted sights and sounds as well as experience difficulty speaking.

The DEMENTIA SIMULATOR is a provocation to move the dialogue about dementia forward.

Fischer’s own traumatic experience inspired her work which teases out the connections between mind, brain and body to create ‘a trauma-focused movement language’. Through film and performance, Fischer explores movement as a therapeutic tool: ‘Most therapies right now, are talking therapies. In trauma, that doesn’t make sense, it’s contrary to the mechanisms of trauma. It’s so important to have a balance between both brain and body.’

While some portions of the brain defensively switch off during a traumatic event, the body continues to register sensations and it is this combination of word and movement that is key for Fischer. What began from her own needs transformed into a process with universal application. ‘I was having treatment and I asked my doctors ‘how are we using my body?’ Trauma affects the body so much, you’re a vessel of pain. It made sense for me intuitively that we were missing something. Then I researched and realised that it wasn’t an intuition, it was the case.’

Sessions that involved ‘privileged’ access to rare or precious museum objects were particularly successful, drawing even the more reluctant participants to connect with the wider group.

Eager to move traumatic experiences from a narrative of shame and stigma to a narrative of strength, Fischer’s work connects not just body and mind, but art and science. ‘Trauma is equal to a failure of imagination,’ she explains, ‘having an imagination is key – whether we call ourselves creative or not – because with imagination we can perceive options. Without imagination, one is completely stuck.

If creativity can help stimulate nonverbal traumatic memories into declarative memories, we can heal with creativity.’

Fischer is an artist and researcher working independently and as a National Institute for Health Research CLAHRC NWL Improvement Leader Fellow. www.laurafischer.co.uk

Museum staff kept diaries throughout the project, as did the project participants, and we worked in partnership with a psychologist from UCL who sat in on the workshops and gathered feedback from participants on their mood and feelings throughout. Participants described sessions as ‘inspiring’, ‘invigorating’ and ‘stimulating’ and noted the importance of facilitators ‘listening to our ideas’. In general, they responded positively to the way that sessions were structured and were keen to share their ideas, memories and experiences.

Intelligence gathered at a follow up event three months later was particularly useful in obtaining an overview of thoughts and impressions on the sessions. One participant reported that since taking part they felt more

positive about their life and health and more determined to keep up their practice of photography and painting. Another reported visiting museums or galleries six times in the past three months, despite not being a frequent visitor before. A third had joined an art class and some of the participants had stayed in touch with one another after the programme ended.

We can’t claim that this short series of workshops changed the world, but we do believe it had a positive impact on those involved - both the participants and all of the museum staff involved. The museum is now seeking funding and developing a programme of similar workshops to extend its reach to other community groups.

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As the programme progressed it was interesting to see the members of our group opening up and growing in confidence. Sessions that involved ‘privileged’ access to rare or precious museum objects were particularly successful, drawing even the more reluctant participants to connect with the wider group. Some began to form relationships outside the workshops, and they all loved meeting students and having opportunities to quiz them on their creative practice.

Laura Fischer BA Performance Design and Practice, 2017

PEOPLE

some sort of making activity. Each session began with time to look at objects from the Collection and all of them included space for discussion and (importantly) tea and biscuits.

In spite of some initial shyness we soon had our group weaving, collaging and printmaking.

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TIME, PLACE, UNIQUE AND CHANGE Sarah Elie, Executive Director of Somers Town Community Association, shares her key words for 2018 Now more than ever, in a landscape that seems to change daily, we should be opening our eyes to the potential that one small act can make a difference.

Time It is time to look beyond our sectoral comfort zones, to understand where our individualism, expertise, knowledge and know-how can be used in a new kind of approach that can truly make a difference.

Place Camden, King’s Cross, the Knowledge Quarter, all world-renowned places, entities, destination points in their own right, yet they sit as neighbours next to some of the most deprived communities in the country.

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Unique Central Saint Martins, Google, the British Library and the Francis Crick Institute are unique, vibrant worldleading organisations ideally placed to change the lives of those who access their services, but equally those outside their front door.

Change For some the word change conjures trepidation, even fear of the unknown. Yet for others it is the only way to the next chapter, the new dawn, the next frontier.

You are probably thinking: ‘great fabulous, but I have a priority list as long as my arm, my boss/tutor is a real pain in the… And I really do need to clean out my fridge or at least buy some food. Where can I

make a change and how can I work so that I can make a difference?’

It begins with the understanding that we are all unique; we each have something that can make a difference.

We just need to appreciate that we often undervalue ourselves and what we have to offer.

Placed within the heart of Camden the Ward of St Pancras and Somers Town is home to a community that deserves to be more than a short cut from St Pancras to Euston Station or a statistic highlighted in red for its multiple indices of deprivation.

It is home to the Knowledge Quarter, the British Library and the Francis Crick Institute and a stone’s throw away from Central Saint Martins, yet I suspect little is known about the community that calls it home by those that work, study or access most of these organisations. Equally most of the residents that call St Pancras and Somers Town home are unaware of the unparalleled wealth of knowledge on their doorsteps.

So we begin by acknowledging the challenges ahead, but also the potential. Accept the limitations in terms of time and resource that we are all hostage too and look beyond to what can be achieved together if we all do one small thing.

Collectively seven people each giving an hour is a working day, this done once a month provides seven working days a year, double that up to 14 people and you get 24 days, double that, treble that and the potential is limitless.

Time, Place, Unique, Change

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COLLABORATE WITH US Artists and designers have a unique role to play in creating and transforming objects, systems and lives for the better. Through CSM PUBLIC, we collaborate with a variety of academic, corporate, nonprofit, citizen-led and government organisations to actively engage with societal issues and co-design more optimistic futures for all.

CSM PUBLIC turns the studio ethos ‘inside-out’, extending our creativity beyond the walls of the College to bring partners an inspiring and supportive context in which to experiment and innovate.

Call Monica Hundal on 0207 514 7256 or email: public@csm.arts.ac.uk to discuss how we can work with you to make change happen.

The projects gathered here prove that creative and collaborative action has the power make change happen. Thank you to all the organisations, partners and individuals who have worked with us across all these stories.

Editor Teleri Lloyd-Jones Copy Editor Kathryn Lloyd Editorial Advisors Monica Hundal Georgia Jacob Designer Cristina Errea Moreno MA Graphic Communication Design #CSMPublic

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