Reflections from London Design Festival ‘24. It’s all about the care.
I did London Design Festival slightly differently this year, I took it a bit slower, I didn’t run around to as many shows as possible. However I did meet some great people and have some wonderful conversations, so I will take that as a win.
I noticed a theme coming through in the work that was being discussed. Attention is turning to the not-so-glamourous, quite a bit tricker side of circularity; the ‘re’ stuff. The remanufacturing, the remaking, and the recycling. Which in reality means a lot of organising, sifting through, excel spreadsheets, and an awful lot of time and care.
It felt like a huge shift, towards a softer and more reflective approach to design. Less about what we can produce physically and more about how can produce creative and community-based solutions and systems.
Lots of pilot schemes are happening, showing the possibility of what circular systems could or should look like. They feel hopeful, yet the task as a whole feels overwhelming. Linear systems are so ingrained into the way we think as a society that for take-back and repair/resale schemes to truly work we will need to reassess how we value materials and maybe more importantly how we value the time and labour that goes into caring for them.
Studio TIP in the ground floor of Material Matters
Circular Economy Blueprints
Circular Economy Blueprints is a 6-month research project involving a number of organisations, with the aim to create blueprint models to reduce the number of materials from certain waste streams going to landfill. During London Design Festival, the group launched their research to open up discussions with the wider community. Rescued Clay are looking at clay waste, Recollective are looking at construction waste from the film and set build industry, Blast Studio are developing techniques for reconstituting wood from joinery waste streams and Re-Made in Park Royal are utilising framework from the HS2 site.
I’ve gone into some further detail on a few of these projects below.
Re-Made Park Royal
ReMade in Park Royal is a materials hub providing saved materials for local residents or makers to purchase and use within the Park Royal area. When discussing the various projects they had been working on as part of Re-Made, in particular, their work at saving the wooden frameworks from the HS2 site, the overarching theme was the time and effort needed to process, catalog, and label materials ready for use again, which is something the Re-Made team does diligently. They also discussed the huge challenges that come with trying to utilise these materials at any kind of scale. Second-hand materials do not have warranties which poses some big challenges for scaling up. The opportunities within this sort of work are huge, the amount of secondhand materials within construction that could be reused is mind-blowing, however, there are many challenges to overcome in order to get these circular systems working. The linear systems we currently have in place do not allow for new circular models to be easily integrated.
Recollective
I had the opportunity to speak with Freya from Recollective, who has been working tirelessly to create more circular systems within the film and set-build industry. Recollective offer a service to take away, process, and re-distribute film sets after their useful life. Again this is work that requires a lot of time and care for the materials that are being saved. One of the big issues we discussed is the challenges around how companies value the services they are providing, as well as the need for a budget to be assigned to end of life processes at the very start of these large set builds.
Blast Studio
I really love the work of Blast Studio, they are also just really lovely people. They use technology combined with natural materials and waste to produce some beautiful work. As part of the work at Park Royal and the blueprint project, they analysed the waste from a joinery workshop, then through experimentation methods found the best combination of wood waste and cardboard to create a composite board material.
Studio Tip
Studio Tip is made up of Charlotte Kidger and Katie May Boyd, both coming from design and materials lead backgrounds, they have joined forces to create a studio that focuses on utilising local and undervalued resources. For Material Matters 2024, Studio Tip took over the entrance space, with a beautifully curated collection of materials, all available for collection by local designers, makers or the general public to make the most of after the show.
What they did very well for this studio launch, is show the beauty of discarded materials and how time, care and creativity can bring discarded materials back to life.
Studio Sanne Visser
Sanne Visser has been working with human hair for almost a decade. I remember seeing her work when she was graduating from CSM Material Futures. Her passion for transforming how we think about human hair as a resource is still as strong now as it was then. This year Sanne took over a whole room at Material Matters, offering free haircuts, showing the process of working with hair and collaborative outcomes of using human hair within design. As with all the other projects described Sanne is trying to change our minds about how we value a certain material and the deep-rooted biases we have towards how we value it.
To conclude, this years LDF wasn’t very shiny or glamourous, but it was full of people who care. People that are looking for solutions within their communities, people that are putting in the time and effort to look after the materials we already have. People that are trying to infilitrate our current systems. It feels pretty good if this is the direction we are going in.