Co Design | TED Research Blog

E-co textiles

28 May 2011

DIY mania was in action last weekend at the Future Everything Craft event in Manchester, with Mel Bowles and Jen Ballie introducing audiences to their co-design textile/fashion projects.

Also at the event were projects including Pics to Knits a web based project which allows a user to convert any image to a knitting pattern which forms a blanket or throw and David Littler’s sampler-cultureclash an international collective of sound artists, DJ’s, embroiderers, textile designers, performance poets, machine hackers and dancers who are exploring the connections between textiles and sound and the cultures of embroidery and DJ-ing.

Textiles & Co Design at TED

11 May 2011

TED member Mel Bowles and PhD student Jen Ballie are both going to be at the Future Everything event this weekend in Manchester.

Mel will be running her workshop ‘The Peoples Print: the empowerment of the consumer through Digital Textile Design’, where participants will be encouraged to create their own digital textile print.

Jen Ballie will be presenting her interactive workshop called The Scarf Project, where you will be encouraged to rip and mix past and present fashion trends to make and style your own bespoke scarf.

Mike Press to speak at Chelsea

8 March 2011

We are very excited to announce that one of our design and craft thinking heroes Prof. Mike Press, is coming to speak at Chelsea College of Art & Design, as part of the TFRC Sustainable Textiles Research Seminar series. It will be an Open Lecture titled ‘Hand-made Knowledge’ on 25th March in the Lecture Theatre, 2 – 3pm.

Mike is Associate Dean of Design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and has written and researched widely on design, innovation, contemporary craft and the management of creativity.

He has authored three books, including The Design Agenda: a Guide to Successful Design Management and The Design Experience.

His research and writing spans three areas: design and crime, the future of craft, and co-design. He is also an experienced supervisor and examiner of PhDs in design, and has been an advocate of practice-based approaches to design research.

Most recently he has been involved in a scoping project to develop a design school in Rwanda.

Image left: Mike Press
Image right: Kntted Remotes, Hazel White

Co-Everything……

9 February 2011

A few things we have been watching, reading and talking about lately around co-design and collaboration……

There’s a new book called What’s Mine is Yours: the Rise of Collaborative Consumption, by social innovator Rachel Botsman. She was speaking at the RSA last week, and we couldn’t get in as it was all sold out. But you can hear the talk here and a talk she gave on TED.com (that’s not us by the way! we are getting confused with the American TED more and more!)

We have been very interested in this new trend in consumer behaviour for a while now, and what it means for designers.

One of our favourite fashion projects that involves online networks and a type of collaborative consumption is the Uniform Project. Founder Sheena Matheiken, was also on TED, and you can watch her talk here and listen to her interview on Radio 4 recently here.

While she wore the same dress for one year, she accessorised it with pieces that were all second hand and all donated or given or swapped. She looked fabulous every single day and by offering a daily update, readers became part of her story and were also encouraged to donate funds to support a charity in India.

In this world of hyper-consumerism, where we have and know everything, consumers are wanting to make more meaningful purchases. This relates to a talk we attended here at Chelsea last week by Glen Adamson, writer and thinker around craft and design. While there were many interesting points made (and hopefully there will be a review of the talk by one of the TED members shortly), the title and thrust of the talk was ‘Affective objects’ - the idea that hand-crafted objects arouse an emotional response in us, and that something that has been made with attention to detail, care and skill, reminds us of the beautiful and profound in life, and is an antedote to our modern living.