Making Futures Journal

Lisa is a sound artist and a seamstress in Berlin, Germany. She has been up-cycling all her life and wanted to channel that practical skill into something useful while staying at home. She has done extensive research into DIY cloth masks in order to devise and test a model that is effective, easy to make and that requires materials we mostly have available at home. She is now sewing masks as fast as possible to donate to local shelters, refugee initiatives, retirement homes, and anywhere that might need them. She delivers them through a makeshift elevator from her first floor balcony on the Sonnenalle.

Dr. Tavs Jorgensen is Associate Professor and AHRC Leadership Fellow at the Centre for Fine Print Research at UWE. Tavs's core research interests are focused on exploring the design and innovation potential presented by new digital fabrication technologies, particularly with the glass and ceramics mediums. He is currently in receipt of Leadership Fellow grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with a project investigating the use of digital tools to develop new approaches with the ceramic extrusion process for architectural applications. Tavs has a very active visiting lecturing career and has delivered lectures at leading international institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University College London, Chulalongkorn University, and The Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen.

Tomas Diez is an urbanist specialised in digital fabrication and its implications in the future of cities and society. He is one of the founders of Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and now he is leading the Fab City Research Laboratory. Tomas leads the FAB City Global Initiative and helps to run the Fab Academy program with a distributed team located in more than 50 Fab Labs globally. He is also the European project manager for the Fab Foundation. Tomas holds a Bachelor degree in Urban Planning and Sociology by the University Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela, a Diploma in social work from the University of Havana, Cuba, a Master in Advanced Architecture by IAAC, and a Diploma on Digital Fabrication in a pilot program on the class “How to Make Almost Anything”offered by the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms in 2008. Tomas is a tutor in Design Products at the Royal College of Arts in London, where he co-runs the Exploring Emergent Futures platform, he is co-founder of the Smart Citizen, FabLabs.io and StudioP52. Tomas has been appointed by The Guardian and Nesta as one of the top 10 digital social innovators to watch in 2013, and has been awarded by the Catalan ICT association as the entrepreneur of the year in 2014.

The longer I have taught people of all ages and abilities to make things, the more I have become interested in craft as a vehicle of formation not only of things but of people and society too. In the retail and manufacturing sectors I design and supervise the sourcing and production of products across a range of market sectors, from mass market to small scale craft production. Over many years, I have trained people in both work place and educational settings to make things using a diverse range of materials and equipment.

Between 2017 and 2019 I conducted action research projects as part of the master’s craft education research program at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, and a PGCE course facilitated by Canterbury Christ Church University. These were based on my teaching work within community and secondary education settings and included collaboration with participants and facilitators as a feature of the research design process.

Maria Hanson is Reader and Principle Lecturer in Jewellery and Metalwork at Sheffield Hallam University. She is Course Leader for MA Design; supervising post-graduate and PhD students alongside undertaking research and practice. She was a Trustee of Museums Sheffield for 7 years and is a Freeman of the Goldsmiths’ Company. Since 2014 she has worked on a number of projects funded by the EPSRC, AHRC, and Research England. Research interests include creative explorations relating to material value and sustainability, product consumption and audience engagement. Recent projects explore co-creative Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods to empower and create meaningful agency.

A graduate of The School of Jewellery in Birmingham and The Royal College of Art in London, Laura Cave has over 20 years experience of working co-creatively with artisan craft makers in emerging economies. She is the founder and director of Just Trade and Chair of BAFTS Fair Trade Network UK. Just Trade supply over 300 retail outlets in the UK and internationally, including independent boutiques and leading Museums and Galleries. BAFTS is a membership network of independent shops and suppliers dedicated to partnering with disadvantaged producer groups in order to provide long-term market access for their work.

Dr Ellya Zulaikha is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Creative Design and Digital Business at the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, Surabaya, Indonesia where she has been lecturing in the department of Industrial design since 2003. She gained a Master Degree from the Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia, and PhD from Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia in 2014. Her research interest is in Creative Collaboration, Participatory Design, Interaction Design, User Behaviour, Industrial Design and Craft Industries. She has been involved in the development program for rural and urban craft industries in East Java, Indonesia, for more than fifteen years.

Laura Quinn is an Irish Glass maker and designer based in the UK. She was awarded the 2015 Emerging Glass Artist Award by the National Craft Awards in Ireland. In 2019 she graduated from Plymouth College of Art with an MA (hons) in 3D Design Crafts.

Quinn’s work focuses on human centred forms that explore the perceived restraints of the material, evident in her wearable and interactive light sculptures. By combining digital manufacturing technologies and traditional glass making techniques she allows the work to be repaired, recycled and redesigned moving her practice to one which is more environmentally conscious.

Kate Armstrong is the communications lead at Fab Lab Barcelona where she also articulates the community and communications of the Fab City Global Initiative. An Australian design and business management undergraduate, Kate has worked in both the public and private sector of the creative field in the Netherlands and Australia on campaigns concerned with community engagement and audience development for social amelioration. Studying a Master of Arts and Society at Utrecht University, she developed her research interest in the causality between the creative industries and climate change. As a freelance consultant Kate has created content and interventions with TEDx Sydney; Trivago; Vivid Festival at Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney; and BioPak Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Helen Pailing graduated in 2004 with a BA Hons Embroidery (MMU) and continued to study the material culture of craft at University of Arts London where she completed her MA Designer Maker in 2012. She is currently undertaking a programme of research in the area of Applied Art, Glass and Ceramics Recrafting waste glass from the National Glass Centre, which is a collaboration between makers and matter at National Glass Centre (UOS). An engagement with materials is central to Helen’s practice which involves the transformation of everyday materials into sculptural objects, architectural interventions and installations. The work is formed out of a playful, intuitive collaboration between maker and matter through a non-verbal dialogue or haptic logic, where the performance potential of the material emerges.

Holly McQuillan’s work in the field of zero waste fashion design, articulates sustainable fashion systems and practice. She focuses on issues such as transition design, the impact of technology and how these can challenge established design, production and use practices. She co-authored Zero Waste Fashion Design (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018) which combines research and practice to introduce a crucial sustainable fashion design approach. Holly co-curated ‘Yield: Making Fashion Without Making Waste”, a survey exhibition of zero waste fashion design with Timo Rissanen and developed the award-winning ‘Make/Use’, an open-source system for making user-modifiable, zero waste garments. ‘Make/Use’ provides a user-centred toolset that helps consumers gain agency in the making and ongoing use of the clothing they wear. Her work always seeks to broaden the impact of zero waste and sustainable fashion design through research, publication, workshops and lectures. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås.

Gabriela Martínez Pinheiro, MPSG, graduated in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidade de São Paulo with an exchange program at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Collaborated on academic projects at LABAUT FAUUSP (Laboratory of Environmental Comfort and Energy Efficiency) and worked at GCP Arquitetura e Urbanismo. She is Co-founder of Estúdio Greta and is currently exploring digital fabrication tools as a new way of creation and production in the Master Design for Emergent Futures, run by IAAC and Elisava.

Dr George S. Jaramillo is an Assistant Professor of Design in the School of Textiles and Design at Heriot-Watt University at its Scottish Borders campus. With over 15 years of professional and academic practice, his work looks on integrating transdisciplinary socio-material assemblages and innovation design processes.

Dr Lynne Hocking-Mennie is a handweaver and scientist whose work explores encoding and decoding of data, particularly related to human genetics/ancestry and bioacoustics. She is practitioner lead for academic research projects that explore data-inspired design, collaborative co-creation, and hybrid analogue-digital making practices.

Zoë Prosser is a lecturer and researcher in Social Design at the Innovation School, Glasgow School of Art. She is also an industry-focused practitioner in the field of service and systems design and design innovation, with a focus on design for participatory democracy and sustainable systems change.

Cally Booker is a handweaver, working with natural fibres and dyes to create complex multi-layered textiles. She draws inspiration from her environment in many ways, seeking out unusual sources of data to incorporate into weave.

Laura Lightbody is originally from Glasgow and a graduate of Glasgow School of Art. She is a ceramic artist and teacher of Art & Design. The surface pattern she applies onto the surface of her slip cast ceramic forms is inspired by graphics and patterns found in the everyday which are often discarded or overlooked.

Carol Sinclair is a ceramics graduate with 30 years experience running her own practice, initially a commercial tile studio and for the last 10 years as an exhibiting artist. A qualified business adviser and coach, she combines her own creative work with the facilitation of arts project on behalf of clients including British Council, NESTA and Cultural Enterprise Office.

A design researcher from the Māori and Indigenous Development faculty at Auckland University of Technology, Diana has over 15 years’ international experience in Mexico, Spain, Japan, Singapore and New Zealand. Her PhD research approached the decolonisation of artisanal design through Buen Vivir and the recognition of Indigenous design in collaboration with Mayan weavers from Chiapas, Mexico. She has a master’s in design management from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, a bachelor’s in industrial design from the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, Mexico, and a technical training diploma in modern design and craftsmanship from Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan.

Anke Nienhuis is Curriculum Leader of the Industrial Design department of the School of Art & Design at Auckland University of Technology, where she is also a lecturer and researcher in the field of industrial design. She values design innovation with a central focus on people and the environment: “I encourage my students to create meaningful products that make positive changes, where they are needed most.”

Before embarking on an academic career, Anke gathered extensive professional experience as a product designer, working for numerous companies in various countries, including The Netherlands, Italy, Japan and New Zealand.

Nadine is Senior Director of Research and Associate Director of the DBA at Hult International Business School. Her expertise and research interests focus on: contemporary issues in organizational behavior; individual differences and leadership development; and business ethics, responsibility and sustainability. She has published extensively in academic and practitioner outlets, including the Journal of Management Education, Harvard Business Review, Forbes.com and Frontiers in Psychology.

Nadine applies her thought leadership and research insights to her practice. She has worked with both public and private sector clients in health, transport, military, and education. She works across Hult’s portfolio, teaching and facilitating Undergraduate, Postgraduate, and Executive Education courses.

A graduate in the History of Design and Culture at the Royal College of Art, Elizabeth worked in multimedia publishing before her interest in artisan craft.After working for a pioneering NGO and social enterprise, Elizabeth led research into modern slavery in fashion supply chains for ‘Slave to Fashion’, published by New Internationalist, 2017. Elizabeth’s current research into responsible leadership, funded by Hult International Business School, asks whether the act of making—an attempt to establish an ongoing visceral connection with materials and labour—can create empathic leaders who are capable of building socially responsible supply chains. Future research interests focus on climate justice and social justice and the subtle nuances that can sometimes place them in opposition to each other.