In the Making: The ‘Power to the People’ Workshop Track at Crafting the Future

Over the last decade several projects and exhibitions have explored how crafts can play a central role for empowerment through social development, innovation and entrepreneurship. In order to facilitate this, there is a need to explore how craft practices can act as tools for empowerment, both in research and practice.

The ‘Power to the People’ track at the European Academy of Design Conference in Gothenburg 2013 tried to answer this challenge with a series of craft-based seminars, each centred on a participant's proposed craft or ‘Paper of Practice’. This formed a series of practice-based seminars that mixed hands-on activities and discussion, centred on and emerging from the very act of doing.

About Earley and Ballie's workshop, Black Hack Chat:

Black Hack Chat was a collaborative workshop co-designed for the 10th EAD conference (Gothenburg, April 2013) and combined Earley's Black Hack approach with Old is the New Black (2010) where Jen Ballie and Otto von Busch re-worked old clothes using black paint.

This workshop was part of the design research by TED for MISTRA Future Fashion, a Swedish consortium concerned with creating sustainable, systemic and profitable change for the fashion industry. When organisations put design at the heart of product and service development, they are triggered to ask the fundamental question about what they make, how they make it, and who for (Thackara, 2008). The approaches included within TED's TEN (Earley & Politowicz, 2010) promote design thinking and demonstrate how textile designers can play a more strategic role to instigate social and environmental change. The workshop combines 3 of the 10 by applying design to replace the need to consume in order to ‘upcycle’ discarded garments (Earley, 2009). Design activism influenced the agency within this workshop and combined insights from two existing projects 'Black Hack' (Earley, 2012) and 'Old is the New Black' (von Busch & Ballie, 2011).