Designing the Commons

I wonder whether, like me, you learned about the commons in high school history lessons. I remember my outrage when I became aware of the historical enclosure of common land in England. Through legislation, collective resources were taken into private ownership, to the benefit of the rich. Before this shift, commoners shared access to the land, using it for fuel and food for themselves and their animals; afterwards, they were forced into waged labour as the only option for survival. This process of violent dispossession has been replicated, time and time again, in societies around the world.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the tragedy of the commons: the argument that any arrangements for sharing a resource are doomed to fail, because someone will inevitably take more than their fair share. This idea, made famous by Garrett Hardin in a 1968 article for the journal Nature, resonated in an era of individualisation. Yet studies of commons that have thrived over time demonstrate its falsity. After all, a field, forest, or river is not, by itself, a commons - other ingredients are needed. These ingredients are the rules, norms, and relationships that shape the use of the resource and ensure that it is sustained over time.

In recent years an alternative approach to the commons has emerged, influenced by the writing of historians such as Peter Linebaugh.

Rather than discussing commons as a noun, the focus is on commoning as a verb.

Attention thus shifts from the management of resources to, in the words of my collaborator Leila Dawney from We Are Commoners, an exhibition catalogue for Craftspace: “collective practices that produce a world in common.” As Dawney explains, this notion of commoning “has gathered traction both as a way of imagining ecological and political futures, and as a way of finding ways to live in an increasingly privatised world.”

The Craftspace curated national touring exhibition behind that catalogue, We Are Commoners: Creative Acts of Commoning, was informed by a research network that brought together academics and artists to explore the many intersections between commoning and craft. Through these conversations, I came to understand that while commons can be linked to physical resources, they can equally be mobile, temporary, and intangible: they arise whenever and wherever people find ways of acting collectively, negotiating ways to share what they have, and rubbing along together. As a designer, I wondered how design might play a role in supporting these commoning practices, recognising their value in a world devastated by extraction, competition, and growthcentric thinking.

My thinking took form in an installation for the exhibition titled A Temporary Outpost of the Blue Fashion Commons. The installation was part of my wider Fashion Fictions project, which brings people together to imagine and explore alternative fashion systems. I imagined a fictional parallel world in which the sale of all blue textiles has been banned for environmental reasons; in response, community-run Blue Fashion Commons Hubs have been set up as spaces for people to exchange and repair their

blue items. I designed and created one such hub, including a simple set of rules, an initial stock of used blue clothing, and mending supplies, then invited exhibition visitors to get involved. By contributing items or spending time on the maintenance of the resource, they were able to join a shifting community of commoners and earned the right to withdraw garments for their own use.

My installation is just one possible interpretation of designing the commons – or, perhaps, designing for commoning. What other interpretations might we come up with, together?

How might we use design to nurture new commoning practices?

How can we use our skills as designers to support people to act, on the ground, for the collective good?

Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd is Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham School of Art & Design. She has explored the emerging field of fashion and sustainability as a designer, maker, researcher, and writer since 2004. Her Fashion Fictions project explores engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems as a route to real-world change. Amy is the author of Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes (I.B. Tauris, 2017) and co-author of Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd