AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXPLORE FASHION AS PARTICIPATORY DESIGN IN A CITY LOCALE

DILYS WILLIAMS AND RENEE CUOCO

In November 2015, we hosted a pop-up event, I Stood Up for (Bio)diversity, in a vacant shoe store at Chrisp Street Market in Poplar, East London. We transformed the empty space for one day to share findings from the Habit(AT) research project and facilitate conversation with the local community through fashion and participatory design activities. Whilst our initial findings, garnered from 140 participants, are not generalizable, they suggest that such processes and practices might reveal, amplify or even create the conditions for place-based social forms, re-enforced by their visibility as spectacles of fashion in the city. Through this feedback loop, an ethos rises up, is made visible (spectacle), becomes accepted (norm), and evolves. Thus the balance between matter making and meaning making might be restored.

Recognition was given to the fact that the raw format evoked at Chrisp Street requires the ‘professional participants’ (researchers and MA students) to be open, vulnerable and exposed, as participants in, rather than leaders of a design process. Whilst not common practice, open-ended participatory design is increasing in visibility across art and design disciplines, Marina Abramovich’s 2015 exhibition, 512 hours, being a case in point. It beholds the socially and ecologically engaged designer to create conditions where ‘every human being participates in the creation of a world experienced as a multiverse of diverse others’ for ‘a relational dynamic to be truly felt.’ In this case ‘the professional designer need not be suppressed, but needs to be redefined as a facilitator of socio-ecological processes’ (Cross 2006).

Through strolling and noticing to explore fashion forms, events and exchanges in the small surrounding area of Chrisp Street, we could begin to understand the elements that come together to create the spectacle. By noticing the interactions of people, place and fashion, we found two ways in which fashion facilitates the forming and proclaiming of a city’s culture, and manifests its social and material flows:

1. Elements of action (described below), which form alternative fashion narratives to the commonly described lifecycle analysis. These are not independent, nor complete, rather they connect people and resources in interrelated flows, their movements sometimes overlapping personal and social interactions, where fashion is practice, garment and statement.
2. Proclamation, which may be loud or quiet, refers to visible manifestations of self in a place. Fashion comes to life on the body, realizing its practical aspects of protection, modesty and ergonomic function, but maybe more critically, its social role in declaring a sense of ‘being human’ in the world. The wearing of fashion in this regard is a political as well as practical endeavor, a demonstrating of the individual and their agency in a place.

ELEMENTS OF ACTION

• Conceive: visible traces of places and interactions where ideas are born and seeded (designer’s studio, fabric stall, social space).
• Make: visible traces of the making of fashion (factory, studio, sewing group, community centre).
• Acquire: visible traces of acquiring, gaining, buying, borrowing, selling, exchanging or learning of fashion (stores, market-stalls, waste skips).
• Care: visible traces of the caring for and about fashion (laundromat, dry cleaners, tailors, haberdashery store).
• Retire: visible traces of the discarding, gifting or re-acquiring of pieces of fashion (charity shop, recycling point, bin, car-boot sale).

The individual demonstrations of concern facilitated through fashion, as explored at Chrisp Street, do not sit neatly alongside fashion’s elements of action, but rather weave in and out of all aspects of the city’s social forms. By witnessing members of the public stand up in a piece designed to relate to their location, and to share concerns in response to visual and oral prompts, confirms to us that each one of us makes meaning through what we wear, alongside and sometimes as part of fashion making and caring. The verbal responses and photographs of participants that were gathered present themselves as a series of articulations of the city, collectively creating a spectacle of fashion that can act as an alternative to those usually reported as ‘fashion in the city’.

In the highly structured setting of fashion in many cities, globally reported fashion weeks and gigantic retail emporia mean that the spectacle of fashion is often fixed; sellers display, shoppers buy, and the currency of a brand can determine the city’s reported style and accepted practices. The economic arrangements at play here, their social divisions, underpinned by political systems and influenced by the acceptance of the city’s inhabitants, lead to forms and events that endorse the city’s often precarious practices and related identity.

As evidenced at Chrisp Street, there are however, other, more fluid, less hierarchical settings for fashion spectacles in the city; often under reported, but nevertheless offering the chance (in our experience quite easily), to visualize new and established cultures of resilience. Markets, historically the meeting place for public activities and the exchange of locally related goods and services, ‘a social structure for the exchange of rights’ (Aspers 2013), can offer a means for professional and citizen designers (Cross 2006) to create social and material forms and ties that multiply restorative practices as they become more visibly part of a city’s ethos and identity. Whilst many markets are now locations for the exchange of goods created many miles away, the visible, tangible sense of everyday personal lives and livelihoods intertwining in a market environment, often mixing old and new, eclectic choice over retail dictation, are spaces for fashion as social connection as well as commercial exchange.

The city is ‘an instrument for understanding the world and the human predicament in it’, (Rykwert 2013), but if we substitute ‘city’ for ‘fashion’ we see a new way to view fashion that connects social processes of fashion-making and city-making as identifiable and highly visible forms of culture. Fashion design, in creating social and material forms, is distinguished as meaning as well as matter making. The former, however, is seldom foregrounded in the discourse of fashion and sustainability, where a rational approach is usually taken, with tools such as lifecycle analysis averaging out existence into a predictable, consistent and managed process (see diagram 1 and 2). But the world and fashion are not like that; how we live and how we wear cannot be prescribed or known as absolutes. The social fit of our clothes involves more intuitive, personal stories and knowledge, which are less easily transferable (Reid 2013), and yet, it is these elements of fashion that stich a city’s social forms and visual narratives together, connecting matter with meaning. Subjective experiences, rather than known fact, involve ways of knowing that are ‘narrative unity and practice’, (Walker 2014), evolving not only through our own developing sense of self, but through the relationships and influences that we have on each other and through ‘the elastic connection between assertion of individuality, connectivity within community and wider contribution to societal infrastructures.’ (Williams 2015).

Through our work at Chrisp Street we recognised the value in exploring the city as a location of spectacle, where people and place, form and event, come together to visualize a city’s culture, ethos and habits. Actions and proclamations of the fashion-spectacle were made visible with local citizens in Chrisp Street Market, and we can see the spectacle of a city created through the activities of its people in relation to the physicality of its space; fashion playing a definitive part. The spectacle is a means to create the habitus, socialized norms that guide behavior and thinking (Bourdieu 1984). The ways in which society becomes deposited in people in the form of lasting dispositions, propensities to think, feel, act in determinant ways, (Navarro 2006: 16), is a reciprocal process informed by the visibility of citizen actions. It is clear fashion is both part of the creation of the habitus, and part of its evolution.

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ASSEMBLING A LOCAL CREATIVE ECOSYSTEM IN MILLBANK

SHIBBOLETH SHECHTER

BACKGROUND

In 2005 Chelsea College of Arts, consolidated its properties, previously scattered around Chelsea and South Kensington to the Grade II listed former Royal Army Medical College buildings, opposite Tate Britain. The vocal support of local residents was important in influencing and preventing Westminster Council from selling the site to a luxury property developer. Residents campaigned that it should become the home of an arts college. Millbank, like many other London neighbourhoods, has suffered from gentrification and social fragmentation. It was the hope of local stakeholders, that the College would provide a platform for developing creative approaches to rebuilding the community and rejuvenating a lost local artisan history.

In 2015, Chelsea College of Arts organised a series of special commissions, exhibitions and public events to mark 10 years at Millbank. During these years the college has become, according to the ‘Chelsea College of Arts celebrates 10 Years’ publicity a ‘landmark in the area’. However, arguably, it has failed on its promise to local residents to become a local ‘community anchor’. Millbank Creative Works (MCW) was set up in the wake of local resident enthusiasm with the move of an art college to the area – its aim to build a creative local ecosystem through projects to connect people and up-skill individuals. The lack of support from the college¹apart from an attempt in 2013 to launch a joint-venture utilising the former Pimlico Library as a creative hub, that fell through due to lack of funding and of Westminster Council led to MCW scaling down its planned activities and building its future on a step-by-step approach. They have launched, among other initiatives, a local community radio station and a food trolley scheme, weekly visiting isolated residents with a bag of healthy food.

MILLBANK STORIES

A couple of years ago we worked on ‘Chelsea Local’, a design project with Chelsea MA Interior & Spatial Design students (ISD) that asked them to re-imagine unused and underused spaces in Millbank as creative nodes in the area. The project built on a network of local actors and places, established by the now terminated Tate Local programme. Through ‘Chelsea Local’, a chance encounter with Wilfried Rimensberger, the force behind MCW, led to a discovery of a shared passion for establishing a creative, resilient local Ecosystem in Millbank, with Chelsea College of Arts staff and students and local neighbourhood stakeholders. Millbank Stories is the first joint endeavor.

Millbank Stories employs storytelling; design objects, in the form of storytelling ‘devices’; creative events, in the form of storytelling parades; and the space of the exhibition to make visible existing community’s and create spaces for new encounters to take place. The creative happenings and artifacts of Millbank Stories helped reinforce the relationship between Chelsea College of Arts and MCW into a formal structure (Community Interest Company) that will enable conversations and collaborations. The parade, the space of the gallery and the exhibited objects also drew people together and facilitated new alliances (such as, the coffee bean bag arts & crafts project, a joint venture between MCW, Tate Britain staff, local residents and University of the Arts London students).

Millbank Stories is part of a larger pedagogic inquiry by the author on the teaching and learning of design skills for community building. Intrinsically, it is important to highlight some of the nodes in the local creative ecosystem and the encounters plotted by ISD students. Millbank Stories asked that they use creative devices to critically engage with ‘site’ and ‘community’ and develop spatial interventions to engage diverse audiences and drive change. Nadaa Emambux designed a ‘knitting trolley’, an artifact that enabled her to overcome barriers and engage in a dialogue with a Millbank elderly knitting group. Members wove stories into the trolley, that then travelled through the area retelling the yarns and creating new encounters. One of these has led to Nadda being commissioned to design, with the knitting group, a permanent ‘Yarn and Tea’ trolley for a community centre. Nadia Rodrigues Pedrosa’s ‘Bow Wow Bench’, an unfolding structure, with a seating area, dog water bowels, dog toys and a display with information on dog services in Millbank, provided a platform for a multitude of meetings between local dog owners to take place. It led to new relationships being formed - ‘I made a new friend today’, and provided an important service for local businesses - ‘I have lived here for twenty years and never knew about this place’²Quotes taken from written feedback to Nadia on Bow Wow bench.. A long term MCW ambition has been to retain creative talent in Millbank, thorough an incubator community hub, a space for developing innovative creative practice. Fabiola Umar, one of the students has lived all her life on the local Grosvenor Estate. Her project, ‘Are You Local’, was a one-day collaborative creative event on the estate, supported by MCW, to re-establish a community spirit and a sense of place she feels has been lost over the years. Fabiola sees her work as the start of a long term sustainable community building and place making endeavor that will allow her to bring her creative skills back into her local community.

Fabiola’s story is unique. The community- in-Millbank³Manzini, E. (2016) Communities in a Highly Connected World [online] Cultures of Resilience Available at: http://culturesofresilience.org/annex-1/ [Accessed 15 June 2016], in particular, the Chelsea College of Arts staff and student body, is fluid. More than half of ISD students are international and will leave Millbank and London after three years. Projects such as Millbank Stories, alongside establishing the college as a community anchor in a local creative ecosystem and ensuring a degree of future resilience, equip students with the skills to employ art and design towards enabling encounters and drawing people together. Through incorporating projects such as Millbank Stories into the curriculum, we are building a global community of graduates with the creative tools to weave people and places together.

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ANGELA HODGSON-TEALL

My practice was developed initially by exploring the impact of introducing structured drawing activities to staff of a mixed ethnicity hospital community in London to find out whether drawing is a useful tool in the practice of empathy. Drawing echoes the craft skills of medicine and makes apparent, emotions and thoughts, in empathic therapeutic interventions.

The events ran as drawing workshops that double up as performances. I often took my cello to these events as I found, in my work at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Woolwich, that the presence and sounds from the cello helped people to draw. The cello clears a space for the body and rhythm. The research culminated in a PhD thesis submission called Drawing on the Nature of Empathy, that will be completed in September 2016 at University of the Arts, London.

This research has led to a number of projects across art venues and other hospitals that have been realised or are in the process of being realised. Reciprocal Loops: UnCritical Care at LCC was one of them. My performances have been elaborated to take into account major political and organisational change. Queen Elizabeth Hospital Woolwich was part of an NHS Trust with the largest financial problems in England, so the events took in elements of dissonance and my participants and I played around with those ideas through drawing and performance.

By chance the LCC performance coincided with a student project that challenged the management structure. Our collaborative performance the following morning counter-balanced the mounting political debate, with elements of calm. This heightened the sense of presence, place, context, giving a strong sense of temporary community, that included students, and a healthcare professional performing splenic palpation, solo cello playing to accompany the rumble of passers-by and Baudelaire’s poetry from Spleen et Ideal, to alleviate anger and melancholy.

The importance of sensing one’s presence in the place or stage of drawing cannot be underestimated. The gestures and cognitions that come from a practice based in life drawing as well as drawing from life are both valuable and therapeutic. Art is good at finding out things one does not already know. I learned how to tap anxiety. The importance of the form of rhythm within drawing experiments had implications for the creation of new polyphonic rhythms within the community undertaking the research art practice. Dissonance was not eliminated; it was lived and worked with. The actions embodied aspirational forces as well as acknowledging the slow pace of change, which encouraged a sense of resilience within this community.

My work suggests that drawing traces and memories together, in an elegiac or haunting way, can resonate with many different people. This act of stitching together the parts of the project, different cuts from the patterns of art, medicine and life, offers a variety of opportunities and ways of thinking about what has happened.

In order to explain how the work might contribute to a sense of temporary community in a distressed environment I describe my performance in the gallery (which is also a corridor leading to the conference centre of the hospital) in the short time before, during and after the Open Staff meeting with the Trust Special Administrator, which was due to announce the future of the Trust.

I lay on the floor and started drawing my everlasting, horizontal figure of eight, a symbol for infinity. The Director of Operations scurried past as I was lying myself down. He did not catch my eye but hurried on past. I was established on the floor as other people started to trickle past me in to the meeting in an adjacent building. The trickle built into a rumble of footsteps and chattering voices. I keep my eyes closed and the comments began. I heard two male voices chatting away as they walk through the gallery. Just before they reach my recumbent form I hear one say to the other, casually and in a matter of fact voice, ‘That’s art.’ And they passed, resuming the original conversation. There is no irony or sarcasm, just a that’s-what-goes-on-here sort of voice. More voices, ‘Are you alright there, Angela? Shall I call the Resus (resuscitation) team for you?’ says Stephen, the Director of Clinical Research for the hospital. After a while I am aware of a shadow and someone asking ‘Can I join you?’ Sally, from the Chemistry Department had returned to the gallery to see what was going on. She was fascinated and wanted to join me. She lay down on the floor beside me. We started toe to toe and moved away from one another on the paper, a metaphor of what the Hospitals within the Trust were going to do, if rumours were correct. After about ten minutes and several metres on prone drawing Sally has to go back to work. She says, ‘What you’re doing is serious isn’t it. It isn’t just about art is it? It’s about cleansing techniques and getting it right for patients.’ I nod.

The problems in pursuing a practice of empathy in these hospital environments include: politics and diversity, highlighting the difficulty of entering and participating in the work. I learned about the importance of working with hospital staff, at all levels, and a sense of how they have learned to ‘hover attentively’ for the benefit of others.

I suggest that what was important about this work, and what will be important for the projects still to be undertaken, is the question of whether the participants can be carried with me, encouraging them to shift. In a sense we become the gallery. This work involves a new syncopation, putting emphasis on weaker beats, highlighting the rhythms of hospital community life and collaborative practice in institutions that engage with these medical metaphors.

Neighbouring¹Neighbouring: a term developed by Anna Hart and Tilly Fowler http://www.airstudio.org/research/neighbouring/ and Networks

ANNE EGGEBERT

‘An approach an artist brings with them might be something new to people, offer an alternative view, a different way of doing things. It might take the form of a script, a template, a score, an invitation to invent, or could be in the shape of a question. This leads on to looking in different forgotten places, disrupting dominant narratives or putting something unexpected on a pedestal for a moment. It might involve a process of abstraction, juxtaposition or intervention in a familiar place to get us to look again’.

Sophie Hope Social Art Map July 2015

How can we begin to teach and learn the processes of social art practice? Artists working in this area necessarily begin with a material practice (experimentation in the studio, generating an object, artefact, event) - even the dematerialized takes practice. Audience follows, and prompts questions on how we engage with or encounter the work, how we bring participants as an active audience and, further, into modes of production. What are the methodologies that can be deployed here?

Context may be important, the location and what it affords are interrogated and deployed as material form or frame for the work – the situation functioning both as content and form. On the face of it this all sounds relatively straight forward, but learning how to connect to and work with others takes ‘dedication, commitment, generosity, persistence, enthusiasm and patience’²Sophie Hope Social Art Map July 2015 and, most particularly, trust. This approach for a student can be a huge ask. Nonetheless, supporting the development of social art practices, the construction of and investment in new networks and their potential, functions to enrich students’ understanding of the sociopolitical context of their work. Students are asked to test the relationships between the studio, the cultural institution and publicness, through art as a destabilizing action.³Jacques Ranciere The Politics of Aesthetics 2006

We ask students to engage in a shared experience of making – first through the networks that their studio affords, collaborating with their peers, and then connecting to networks of partner organisations and further to informal networks in the wider communities local to CSM Kings Cross.

The multi-directional complexities of these projects include BAFA students mentoring those aiming to enter HE; exchanges between young art students and local older people (who are themselves engaged in art making); developing work for, curating and performing a public carnival event in the Turbine Hall at Tate;⁴http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/performance-and-music/bmw-tate-live-hill-down-hallindoor-carnival each project, in its own unique way, develops new networks of social engagement. These new networks are not necessarily sustainable (students finishing their courses and the general flow of London life) but the momentary, fluid, short-lived connections can be as powerful as long-term relationships. They can be revelatory and teach us something about interdependency towards our next set of interconnections. They can also build long-term relationships and influences.

Networks of self-selecting / self-organising participants might operate as a counterculture – as Stephen Willats proposed in his 1982 essay ‘Inside the Night’,⁵Networks ed Lars Bang Larsen, Documents of Contemporary Art Whitechapel, 2014 these networks might offer an agreement as ‘an active creative action between participants, a layering onto existing realities of new or different values and beliefs, so that perception and behaviour within the network are now changed. In this sense ‘reality’ is constructed by the psychology of individuals in association with the groupings or networks of relationships towards which they are drawn or in which they find themselves.‘ Self-organising networks might be developed through a rethinking of existing networks or bringing together two or more pre-existing networks to construct a new set of relationships.

Dialogue is often both the process and outcome of socially engaged art practice. If so what can provoke this, how might it be instigated, how should it be documented or translated into a new form? Or, indeed, stand as the work itself – the participants as both protagonists and audience (see Barby Asante and Teresa Cisneros’s project with the sorryyoufeeluncomfortable Collective⁶sorryyoufeeluncomfortable.com). Conversation is not something that can be taught but the ethics, intentions, challenges of the project can be discussed, teased out, interrogated. This is where the material comes into play to prompt processes of engagement and the provocation towards dialogue – a set of actions or explorations with no specific outcome in mind, where the artist is alert to the revelation of the unexpected. The material becomes the methodology.

A powerful example of social art practice is Sarah Cole’s work Nest⁷http://www.sarah-cole.co.uk/Nest_subpage.html that built a long-term relationship with the network of staff, parents, children and governors of an Essex primary school as a process of live research into lived experiences culminating in a promenade performance with the community. This extended three year project contributed to research that ‘suggests a significant response to place from even the most temporary of denizens, the visiting or ‘cuckoo’ artists, implying that even when performing there briefly, strong relationships with a place can develop.’⁸Sally Mackey and Sarah Cole ‘Cuckoos in the Nest: Performing place, artists and excess’ in Applied Theatre Research journal Volume 1, issue 1. December 2012 Cole and Mackey go on to conclude that ‘excess’ contributes to the performance of place, that ‘transgression, the non-quotidian and boundlessness – that can enhance participants’ affective response to, and memories of, place.’ Rather than place-making this process proposes an alternative articulation of place.

In the Kings Cross area students are a significant transient community through choice. The structure of their degree programme usually lasts three years (although BAFA students have an optional additional Diploma in Professional Studies sandwich year). International and EU students often return home during the summer break for financial or family reasons. Some will remain in the city after their degree for further study or work while others will disperse across Europe and globally. In the current climate of the mass movement of people, in a world city, 3-4 years might be understood as a significant period of habitation. Others, transient for economic reasons (e.g. leaving the city as the rising cost of accommodation far outstrips the Living Wage), migrants seeking work and refugees peace, do not have the luxury of choice. The twenty-first century’s great obsession is with the menacing anthropocenic interglaciation and migration – we propel a populous into movement through our reconfiguration of the world and the lack of distribution of its riches. In this climate connecting with our neighbours (transient or otherwise) offers a moment of exchange and the proposition of new subjectivities. Art offers a methodology for the engendering of these new relationships. Cross-generational connections, for example, between students and older local people, might offer a model for, or open up the possibility of, dialogue that exchanges and deploys the richness of difference.

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BECKY EARLEY, BRIDGET HARVEY AND LUCY NORRIS

In her introduction to Mauss’s The Gift (1990), Mary Douglas says the recipient of charity does not ever like the giver, and that “foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts.” She suggests the problem is the giver wanting “exemption” from reciprocation: “Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties... According to Marcel Mauss that is what is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.”

COLLECTING

Clothing Loathing at the School Gates:

Becky Earley

It was the image of the small, drowned boy Aylan Kurdi, in August 2015 that made me want to do something. Through Facebook – where I first saw the image – I found friends wanting to act too. We agreed to set up collection points for material goods urgently needed in Calais. It was not difficult to fill the car several times over with the goods I collected. In fact, it was something about this abundance that began to make the voluntary action feel repugnant. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. Why did this generosity seem obscene? Why this overwhelming negative feeling to the mini, local campaign I instigated?

Collecting one morning at the local West London school gates, I experienced both positive and negative extremes of responses to the refugee crisis. I stood by the open car boot, whilst a flood of donations arrived. The school run is a hurried, intense affair, so maybe that was why this twenty minutes seemed to me to be so wrought with emotions.

I felt guilt (for only being able to do this small act, yet being praised and revered); I felt revulsion (at the gluttony of over consumption and resulting need for weeding out inappropriate donations); I felt grateful and compassionate to those saying kind things (and who came with essentials purchased for the appeal, or carefully sorted items.) I also felt fury (at the mother who brought nothing but vented her anger at the unwelcome ‘immigrants’). I felt further guilt for noting and feeling this seemingly inappropriate range of emotions. Man up, I thought to myself.

SORTING, DISTRIBUTING

Kleiderkammern in Berlin: the poison in the gift:

Lucy Norris

With over 90,000 refugees arriving in Berlin in 2015, local volunteers have had to support failing state services. An emergency shelter was established in our local sports hall opposite the primary school. Engaged parents and teachers began organizing donations of clothing and toiletries, providing assistance with bureaucracy, establishing a children’s class, running social events, and winning a prize for their efforts.

Yet the initiative creating tension is the Kleiderkammer,¹Kleider means clothing, Kammer is a small room or chamber. Kleiderkammern are run by charitable institutions, and mediate clothing donations in Germany. They distribute to those in receipt of social benefits or sell for a nominal amount, unlike the contemporary UK charity shop model which now aims to sell used goods at the highest possible price to fund their (mostly unrelated) core aims (Norris 2015). run by local mothers who sort donations and hand out garments directly to the refugees. Sorting donations can be unpleasant – clothing may be dirty and some bags seem full of rubbish – paint-splattered Lederhosen, worn-out socks. Others are embarrassingly full of nearly-new children’s wear, over-large men’s clothing, ski-wear, shoes lacking laces, or unsuitable women’s clothing. Such experiences are common amongst charity shop workers and textile recyclers, who render the realities of our consumption and disposal practices invisible to us,²(Norris 2012) (Hawley 2006)(Gregson et al. 2014) but for these mums it is a shock: the donors are our peers.

Inviting the refugee visitors into the Kleiderkammer is awkward: the conflicting values of the refugees’ hosts exposed through their material offerings. As gifts between unequals with no expectation of return (Graeber 2001), Parry calls this type of charity ‘pure gifts’ – the recipients’ ensuing dependency is the ‘poison in the gift’ (Parry 1986). However, exerting agency, refugees may only take what they want, or simply discard donations previously taken, lacking washing machines or storage. This behaviour led to some confused volunteers feeling the refugees needed to ‘integrate and learn German cultural values by showing that they valued these gifts appropriately’, and others feeling the kleiderkammer should be shut down. The kleiderkammer offers a microcosm for understanding the ambiguous attitudes of local residents to the presence of refugees in their community through the thoughtful – and thoughtless - ness of their gifts, and the stresses and strains of volunteering to make a difference.

GIVING

(Dis)Obedience - Generosity - Well-Being:

Bridget Harvey

My volunteering focuses on repair - teaching people how to mend textiles, mending textile donations for a charity, facilitating repair workshops, and planning/organising with the Hackney Fixers group. It is driven by me, I step up and step back as I wish. To me, volunteering is a form of mutual aid - an anarchist principle of “cooperation and generosity” (Portwood-Stacer 2013, p25), “an ethically mandated expression of solidarity with fellow activists” (Ibid, p165).

Volunteering is both “obedient” to my own “reason or conviction (autonomous obedience)” of being anti-waste and pro-circularity, and disobedient to those of our consumer culture, where “obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission” (Fromm 1981, p19).

Arguably our dominant culture is what Erich Fromm describes as having - with principles around ownership, gains and growth. To volunteer is to push back (that act of obedience/disobedience) against capitalist consumerism and embrace Fromm’s mode of being – “to share, to give, to sacrifice - that owes its strength to the specific conditions of human existence and the inherent need to overcome ones isolation by oneness with others” (1981, p108).

This in turn cultivates the key elements for well-being (Seligman 2011, p24-25) - positive emotion, engagements, relationships, meaning, and achievement. Both subjective and objective, in order to fulfill these elements, one must engage positively with others. Neil Cummings suggests generosity as a way to “overwrite scarcity with abundance”, advocating we “keep giving and receiving.  This is radical generosity.” (Cummings 2015, p325). Volunteering is a form of generosity that can overwrite emotional and material scarcity, and create the connections needed for well-being.

We can cultivate the generous, connected mode of being: through volunteering we chose to do so.

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A GLIMPSE OF HOW WE MIGHT BECOME AGENTS OF CHANGE

DAVID CROSS

In March 2013, UAL Vice Chancellor Nigel Carrington publicly committed UAL to tackling climate change and helping the transition to a post carbon society.¹The People & Planet Green Education Declaration See peopleandplanet.org/green-education-declaration/signatories (accessed 30 April 2016). Recommending rapid action to keep up with the students, I sent him and his team research briefings on climate change, financial instability and the risk of fossil fuels becoming ‘stranded assets’²For a definition and discussion of stranded assets, see for example, Atif Ansar, Ben Caldecott and James Tilbury, ‘Stranded Assets and the Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign: what does divestment mean for the valuation of fossil fuel assets?’ Stranded Assets Programme, Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, University of Oxford, 8 October 2013.. I alerted them to the ‘reputational risks’ of banking with the Royal Bank of Scotland, and proposed that UAL could be the first UK university to divest from fossil fuels.

Inspired by Bill McKibben, 350.org., People & Planet and Platform, I gave lectures throughout 2013 and 2014,³See for example the Mapping Art Practices conference, Hoxton Town Hall, London, organised by Standpoint Gallery, 24 June 2014. http://2012.a-n.co.uk/news/single/sympoisum-set-to-map-uk-wide-art-practice/5 (accessed 30 April 2016) proposing that UAL should divest from fossil fuels, and reinvest in renewable energy that is decentralised, diversified and democratically controlled.⁴See www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719; www.350.org and www.peopleandplanet.org. (accessed 30 April 2016). Several students joined me to form the Divest UAL campaign. I provided research material; the students submitted Freedom of Information requests; I painted banners; the students started a petition and Facebook group; I raised the issue with colleagues and lobbied senior management; the students held stalls at UAL events; we all went on demonstrations for fossil fuel divestment.

TransActing – A Market of Values⁵See www.criticalpracticechelsea.org/wiki/index.php?title=TransActing:_A_Market_of_Values and www.criticalpracticechelsea.org/wiki/index.php?title=Market_of_Values (accessed 30 April 2016). in July 2015 was a turning point for Divest UAL, and perhaps for the relationship between my teaching, practice and research. I decided to present a rhetorical inversion of the political activism of the Divest UAL group, the sociable collectivity of Transacting and the progressive idealism of sustainability. The students agreed to hold a fossil fuel divestment stall, freeing me to try my first art performance, in which I satirically personified the conflicted idea of ‘sustainable growth’, which for an artist/academic implies sharing social skills in the service of an economic system causing ecological destruction. I hired my graduation robes for Master of Arts at the Royal College of Art, and paid a makeup artist to give my flesh the appearance of putrefaction, in homage to the Occupy movement’s use of the zombie as the figure of neoliberalism.

Amidst the warmth and conviviality, I made a revolting spectacle of myself as the living dead: a tenured academic, obsessing over the destruction of social value through the pursuit of profit, yet implicated in the commodification of my own cognitive and affective labour. I ‘acted out’ my arrested development as a lone researcher, a pathetic one-person pageant of academic heritage. I recalled the tradition of the robed mystic in the marketplace, dispensing predictions, knowledge or wisdom in return for payment. But I barely spoke, and asked for nothing. I titled the performance, ‘Master of the Universe’, in reference to the financiers cynically inflicting the global financial crisis, and to the Masters of the University, pragmatically negotiating the resulting problems.

In October 2015, the Divest UAL students staged a ‘die-in’ at Central Saint Martins. In the busy concourse of the art school, housed in a corporate building rented from private property developer Argent (whose security staff patrol the premises), the students spread out their banner, lay down and ‘died’.

Ambiguously poised between defiance and capitulation, their action complemented carefully gathered evidence and reasoned argument with an almost desperate psychological affect. I have seen public ‘die-ins’ involving many more people, but I was moved by these students’ solidarity and courage. Enacted in a place where they are well-known, their gesture as a minority was to put themselves in a position of symbolic vulnerability, highly visible on the unstable border between art and activism.

In November 2015 UAL announced that it would divest its endowments of £3.9 million from fossil fuels, and sign the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment. But the announcement didn’t acknowledge the work of Divest UAL. So, presenting an update on sustainability to the November 2015 Professors and Readers Committee, I said that congratulations were due — to the students of Divest UAL, and to the management of UAL for responding to them. The campaign reduced our exposure to the risks of fossil fuel, and our contribution to climate change. By reaching out across divisions between the university’s curriculum, operations and governance, it also offered a glimpse of how, as a community of practice, we might become agents of change.

At the February 2016 Committee, I drew attention to the UK Government’s consultation paper, Fulfilling Our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Student Choice and Social Mobility (2015).⁶Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, Fulfilling Our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Student Choice and Social Mobility (November 2015). Retrieved from www.gov.uk/government/consultations/higher-education-teaching-excellence-social-mobility-and-student-choice (accessed 30 April 2016). I said that focusing opposition on the evaluation of ‘teaching excellence’ had distracted from the paper’s radical proposals to transform Higher Education, by allowing universities to change their governance structures, cease operating in the public interest, and transfer their assets. The Government’s stated aim is to create a competitive market amongst ‘education providers’. I warned that to compete with deregulated private commercial rivals, would risk becoming like them: ruthless, unstable and unsustainable.

However, I proposed we could use the Government’s proposals to:

• reform UAL’s governance structure to make it more democratic
• enshrine in our constitution a commitment to sustainable social benefit
• transfer the university’s assets into a trust dedicated to delivering that aim.

Radically rethinking an institution brings not only the rewards of creating new visions, plans and models, but also the risks of breaking with convention, and the troubles of facing problems we might prefer to avoid. As a not-for-profit co-operative social enterprise, UAL might overcome internal divisions and make new connections, from the institutional through to the psychological. Perhaps, with a more democratic form and explicit social purpose, we could move beyond teaching creativity, resilience and sustainability, to becoming more creative, resilient and sustainable.

Yet, like the economic/ecological crisis which it is part of, the struggle over the purpose and value of art and design education poses ‘wicked problems’: not only are we implicated in the issues we face, but we may have different or conflicting interests, both between and within ourselves. Rather than try to determine a relationship between people and place, could we claim our university as a place for collective self-determination? By combining institutional critique with transformative pedagogy, we might expand the range of our possible futures from the apocalypse of climate chaos to the utopia of radical democracy.

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For the Mental Wellbeing of Children and Young People

Nick Bell

In late 2014, Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT), together with users of its youth mental health service, embarked on a process of creative and critical appraisal conceived by Early Lab.

Twelve months in, the pull of the specific context in rural Norfolk broadened the original scope of the project. The experiment began with the aim of sketching out new visions of a youth mental health service, but the urgent need for the system to function preventatively has necessitated attention in areas outside of the service itself. That is, scrutiny of the socio-ecological conditions in the region that a youth mental health service would anticipate.

ANALYSIS

Questions are being asked of the life experiences of children and young people that contribute to them needing or not needing the support of a mental health service.¹The Department for Education, UK Government with Department of Health’s online mental health training team; MindEd; NHS England and the Children and Young People’s Improving Psychological Therapies programme team (CYP&IAPT); Professor Mick Cooper, Professor Peter Fonagy; SEN at DoE; DoE’s Primary and Secondary Heads’ Reference Groups (2015), Mental health and behavior in schools: departmental advice for school staff. Reference: DFE-00435-2014. Download at http://www.gov.uk/government/publications These questions concern the most important relationships children have; with parents, carers, siblings, peers, teachers, neighbours and neighbourhoods. Children can strengthen these ties by better communication of their thoughts and feelings. Understanding the process through which they can be helped to achieve this is a primary aim of the project and one that renders any immediate review of child contact with health services, social services or youth justice officials as premature.

COMPLEXITY DEMANDS INTEGRATION

A focus on the nature of human relationships will confirm that a child’s mental health, (that their social experiences contribute to significantly), can’t be managed or even fully understood through the lens of a single public service sector.²“…Services need to be outcomes-focused, simple and easy to access, based on best evidence, and built around the needs of children, young people and their families rather than defined in terms of organizational boundaries. Delivering this means making some real changes across the whole system. It means the NHS, public health, local authorities, social care, schools and youth justice working together to: place the emphasis on building resilience, promoting good mental health, prevention and early intervention. Simplify structures and improve access: by dismantling artificial barriers between services by making sure that those bodies that plan and pay for services work together… Deliver a joined up approach: linking services so care pathways are easier to navigate for all children and young people, including those who are most vulnerable, so people do not fall between gaps.” Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Taskforce (March 2015): Future in mind: promoting, protecting and improving our children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing. Some Taskforce members include: Sarah Brennan, Chief Executive, Young Minds; Prof Mick Cooper, Prof of Counselling Psychology, University of Roehampton; Margaret Cudmore, Vice Chair, Independent Mental Health Service Alliance; Prof Peter Fonagy, National Clinical Lead CYP&IAPT, NHS England, & Chief Executive, Anna Freud Centre; Anne Spence, Taskforce Policy Lead; Dr Jon Wilson, Clinical Lead, Norfolk Youth Service, NSFT. NHS England, Department of Health, UK Government. Ref. No 02939. Published to gov.uk, in pdf format only. http://www.gov.uk/dh Yet this is what is currently expected of the NHS – for the health model to be primarily responsible when the mental health of a child subsides. And this is even though the contributory factors are highly likely in many children to have been triggered, aggravated or even caused by events outside the biological realm of health. Obviously, circumstances at home or in school, for example, contribute fundamentally to the wellbeing of children. Traditionally however, these domains are the separate sanction of local authority social services or education bodies, should wellbeing be seriously threatened.

Plainly, lives as they are lived are far more complicated and mean that the real life concerns of each public service body are mutual: intricately intertwined despite the Government mandates that tend to erect barriers between them. Over the years, discrete public service sector cultures combined with contradictory operating incentives have bred, and this has made the cross-agency collaboration that is so essential for youth mental health very challenging. Without the early warning signals that cross-agency integrated care would provide, the NHS youth mental health service is reduced to crisis-response mode: only able to act when it is already too late. Its own ideals of prevention and early intervention pushed further out of reach.

The weaving of resilient communities-in-place is hampered by the dis-incentivising of preventative behaviours by self-contained public service models structured and resourced in a way that only permits them to act in moments of crisis.³“…sometimes the health service has been prone to operating a ‘factory’ model of care and repair, with limited engagement with the wider community, a short-sighted approach to partnerships, and underdeveloped advocacy and action on the broader influencers of health and wellbeing. As a result we have not fully harnessed the renewable energy represented by patients and communities, or the potential positive health impacts of employers and national and local governments.” NHS England with Care Quality Commission, NHS Health Education England; Monitor; Public Health England; Trust Development Authority (October 2014). NHS Five Year Forward View. Chapter 2, What will the future look like? A new relationship with patients and communities, pdf page 10. In the particular case of youth mental health, if the sirens are blaring then one can be sure irreversible damage has already been done and unavoidably a huge cost already incurred. The metaphor of ‘the safety-net’ fails in youth mental health – it is reactive when what is required is proactivity – and this is a false economy. A whole healthcare system predicated on only acting when you fall, when in fact as far as the wellbeing of young people and children is concerned the ‘safety-net’, in these days of austerity at least, is lying on the ground.

VISION

The kind of community that this project aims to produce is one in which the issue of mental health is promoted and therefore highly visible.⁴The vision of a community that is both rooted and open is one of the outcomes from Early Lab Workshops A & B conducted with lead clinicians of the youth mental health service of Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT). These workshops were conceived and conducted by Early Lab during its Project 1 field trip to Norfolk in late March/early April 2015. A community that is:

• ROOTED – one empowered by access to emotional tools that help to build in its children and young people the capacity to cope with the inevitable ups and downs of life. A kind of active coping that is co-produced through informal interaction with their peers and families in a community fortified with high relational intensity and strong social ties.
• OPEN – but also a community in which mental ill-health awareness has reduced the stigma associated with it to a level that permits formal support for it to be explicitly promoted by its institutions (education, health, social, justice) that can introduce lighter forms of involvement through a range of social tie strengths and relational intensities.⁵Ibid., page 193. Use of the word ‘territory’ in this context is borrowed from the Italian Territorialist School via Ezio Manzini. This would allow a public service consisting of cross-agency integrated care to be clearly visible and easily accessible very early: as soon as the first emergent behaviours, before any crisis is yet apparent – preventatively.

In this scenario, NSFT is a top-down public service organisation that, driven by a desire to be preventative, is blurring its boundaries with other public service domains and enthusiastically adopting forms of bottom-up and peer-to-peer interaction. It is becoming hybrid: a form of collaborative social enterprise with grassroots tendencies that binds it to its communities. It takes a long-term view, is focussed on the wellbeing of its territory⁶Ibid., page 25. The idea of being local yet exposed to global flows of information comes from Ezio Manzini’s concept of ‘cosmopolitan localism’. while being connected to global flows of information.⁷Ibid., page 187. “The framework project is a design and communications initiative including scenarios (to give local projects a common direction), strategies (to indicate how to implement scenarios), and specific supporting activities (to systemize the local projects, to empower them, and to communicate the overall project)” – Ezio Manzini. Its clusters of projects aim at contributing to a planning framework⁸Ibid., page 68. “In today’s turbulent environment, organisations evolve over time, calling for a constant upgrading of their way of working.” – Ezio Manzini. for its territory and it innovates on an ongoing and open-ended⁹This proposal is one of the outcomes from Workshops A & B conducted with lead clinicians of the youth mental health service of Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT). These workshops were conceived and conducted by Early Lab during its Project 1 field trip to Norfolk in late March/ early April 2015. basis.

PROPOSALS

1. USE EXISTING SOCIAL ORGANISATION – HOME, SCHOOL, COMMUNITY – AS ELEMENT OF THE MENTAL HEALTH ECOSYSTEM¹⁰The use of the term ‘favourable enabling ecosystem’ comes from Ezio Manzini. “Collaborative organisations are living organisms that require a favourable environment to start, last, evolve into mature solutions, and spread.” – Ezio Manzini (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: an introduction to Design for Social Innovation: The MIT Press: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. 2015. ISBN 978-0-262-02860-8. Page 90.

In response with Early Lab, NSFT and its complimentary public sector colleagues are thinking holistically: what are the ways to reduce the incidence of young people ‘falling’? Can this be achieved by creating a more favourable enabling ecosystem¹¹This proposal is one of the outcomes from Workshops A & B conducted with lead clinicians of the youth mental health service of Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT). These workshops were conceived and conducted by Early Lab during its Project 1 field trip to Norfolk in late March /early April 2015. (home, school, community) in which young people prefer preventative behaviours that make it easier for them to remain ‘standing’ without recourse to the formal interventions of a mental health service?

2. SCHOOLS – THE ROLE OF PLACES AS ENABLERS

Early Lab and NSFT see primary and secondary schools as the key sites in which to rekindle the favourable conditions (that could help make the reduction of the incidence of young people ‘falling’ possible) because they are hubs of community.¹²The language for the framing of this proposal benefits from Ezio Manzini’s emphasis on the importance of the social role of weak social ties: “…it is precisely these weak ties that make the social system more open and able to communicate. Indeed… in the words of Granovetter, when strong ties predominate ‘information is self-contained and experiences are not exchanged.’ This means… that organisations tend to close in on themselves, not exchange experiences, and fail to evolve.” – Ezio Manzini (2015) Design, When Everybody Designs: an introduction to Design for Social Innovation: The MIT Press: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. 2015. ISBN 978-0-262-02860-8. Page 102. Mark Granovetter (1973), The Strength of Weak Ties, American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6, p.1360-1380.

3. BALANCE DIFFERENT KINDS OF SOCIAL ENCOUNTER IN TERMS OF DEGREE OF INVOLVEMENT AND QUALITY OF INTERACTION

Built over years, schools share the strong social ties with children that families, friends and communities do, but balance the informal encounters of high relational intensity that children experience outside of school in their community, with a formal low relational intensity in school.

4. WELLBEING CHAMPION – THE ROLE OF SOCIAL PEOPLE AS CONNECTORS¹³This proposal is one of the outcomes from Workshops A & B conducted with lead clinicians of the youth mental health service of Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT). These workshops were conceived and conducted by Early Lab during its Project 1 field trip to Norfolk in late March/early April 2015.

To make genuine early-intervention possible, Early Lab and NSFT plan to introduce into schools a champion for mental wellbeing. This is a teacher-trained wellbeing champion with a good grasp of mental healthcare principles, shared by three schools in a region. The wellbeing champion would be in a pivotal position to identify early any signs of concern just as they begin to surface, and with powers of referral, help prevent mild difficulties becoming acute. Their alternating part-time presence maintaining weak social ties with the three schools would loosen up tightknit social fabrics dominated by strong social ties. Added to that, their close contact with sectors outside of education such as health, social care and youth justice, would open up schools and their communities-in-place to the wider enabling ecosystem of the territory in which they are situated.

THE ROLE OF THE DESIGN PROCESS

Early Lab has found its project partners, that’s youth mental health provider NSFT, the head of Norfolk County Council Children’s Services, the head of its Clinical Commissioning Group, as well as representatives of the local voluntary sector, to be very keen to find ways to work together despite their cultural and operational contrasts. This kind of diversity is however not a problem: a range of approaches is in fact essential when it comes to effecting good collaboration and designers, (designers for social innovation, at least), know this well.

CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR A SOCIAL CONVERSATION

Through Early Lab’s making-workshops, design has won a significant role for itself in being an alternative language all participant entities can try out when dreaming up new approaches to youth mental health. Here, with health and social care professionals, thinking-through-making¹⁴Early Lab use of thinking-through-making has drawn extensively on the public engagement experiences of designer and UAL tutor at Camberwell College of Arts, Fabiane Lee-Perrella, through her practice Flour. http://www.ourflour.com/flour/about/ provides them with a model-agnostic process for stakeholder engagement and concept co-development, circumventing the barriers hoisted by siloed public service sector-thinking, and ensuring cross-agency collaboration is more effective.

The lesson from Early Lab’s making-workshops is design can operate in this way because it is alien enough as a language and mode of thought for all public sector participants to act as a leveller for them. The shared unfamiliarity can create a positive apprehension that while not removing discrepancies between parties, can overshadow them¹⁵As a participant [of the Early Lab field trip workshops] it was lovely to witness a level of cohesion between different services (that I had never witnessed before), all willing to let their ‘creative juices’ flow in a fun environment for a common cause: improving the mental health service experience and access for local young people.” Tim Clarke (2015), Research Clinical Psychologist, NSFT reflecting on his experience of the Early Lab Project 1 field trip of March/April 2015 on the NSFT blog What’s The Deal With… http://www.whatsthedealwith.co.uk/blog/%E2%80%98creative-meeting-minds%E2%80%99 Accessed on 22 June 2016. and enable a group that remains diverse in perspective to be co-actors in an equitable process.¹⁶Early Lab views all participants in a co-design workshop as ‘co-actors in an equitable process’ as opposed to a traditional ‘design-thinking’ method that has a propensity to present the designer as a facilitator and to present the participant as a person who is merely engaged instead of being seen as an individual acting off their own back, their own agency. The Early Lab approach (mindful of the dangers of paternalism) continues Fabiane Lee-Perrella’s practice at Flour that staunchly opposes the designer acting as background facilitator in these communal thinking-through-making processes. The naming of the ‘fraternalistic’ approach: ‘co-actors in an equitable process’ comes from Adam Thorpe and Lorraine Gamman whose writing, research and advice inspires us greatly – particularly this text: Design with Society: why socially responsive design is good enough; Adam Thorpe and Lorraine Gamman (2011); CoDesign Journal 7:3-4, Sept-Dec 2011, 217-230. Taylor & Francis: ISSN 1745-3755 online. p.222. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15710882.2011.630477 Accessed on 22 June 2016.

CREATING CONVERSATION TOOLS TO EMPOWER THE CONVERSATION

A process of co-design with making at its core transcends what would traditionally be mere verbal discussion because communication takes place through vibrant physical and visual objects made in the workshop.¹⁷“I argue no more and no less than that the capacities our bodies have to shape physical things are the same capacities we draw on in social relations.” “A more accurate if rather more complex process of visualization is required particularly at the edge, the zone in which people have to deal with difficulty; we need to visualize what is difficult in order to address it.” – Richard Sennett (2008). Richard Sennett, The Craftsman: Penguin Books, London, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-141-02209-3. p. 290 and 230. Meaningful objects, that not only unlock local capacities, capture knowledge and tell stories, they also provide a different kind of reflection, a novel feedback that participants experience viscerally. When made visual and physical, new ideas and scenarios can appear more tangible, real, actionable.¹⁸“Methods and tools for making give people – designers and non-designers – the ability to make ‘things’ that describe future objects, concerns or opportunities. They can also provide views on future experiences and future ways of living.” Elizabeth B. -N. Sanders & Pieter Jan Stappers (2014): Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning. CoDesign Journal 10:1, 5-14, 6. DOI: 10.1080/15710882.2014.888183. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15710882.2014.888183 NSFT’s verdict on the Early Lab process was that a route to service transformation now appeared more achievable and in large part because they could see it laid out and animated in front of them.

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