Biblioteket Skaberværelset Tingbjerg- Textile Inquiries

Gaia Colantonio BIBLIOTEKET SKABERVÆRELSE TINGBJERG - textile inquiries

Graduation Project Tutor: Thomas Binder Codesign Master Program - KADK 34301 keystrokes 26.05.2016

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful to Martin, without him the Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg would not have been possible. I have benefited immensely from his support, wisdom and patience.

My appreciation also goes to Thomas for being my tutor and for the constancy of his encouragement throughout the master in Codesign.

Thanks to Sissel for her constructive comments and because without her I would not be here writing about this project.

Thanks to Mikkel for his support and his help during the whole project and also to Monika for the constant cheering presence and help.

I’m grateful to all the librarians of Tingbjerg: Tove, Peter, Chaker, Aga and Jeanett. Their collaboration made the project to be possible. A special thank to Thomas, the librarian, because he made us feel welcome from the first day.

Thanks to Linda and the women from Kontakten, to Maya and Olli and to all the institutions that have supported and still are supporting us in this project.

I’m extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Daniel and learn from his experience and continuous suggestions.

Thanks to Ines for her great graphic design for the Biblioteket Skaber - FixHub Festival but also for the good company during the work.

I am also grateful to all my fellow students and to Eva and Joachim for their constant support, interest and good feedback. In particular I’m thankful to Emmy, Sofia, Isabel and Melanie for their friendship, smiles and encouragements.

I’m really grateful to my family who supported me during these years and encouraged me to begin this amazing design journey.

An immense thanks to Trianglen, my collective and second family, for being part of my project and my everyday life.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRO 7 BACKGROUND 8 REFLECTION ON PRACTICE AND METHODOLOGY 11 BIBLIOTEKET SKABERVÆRELSE TINGBJERG 15 UPCYCLING AS A WAY TO CREATE CONNECTIONS 2.0 21 FAST FASHION FOR FAST UPCYCLING 23 THREE ENCOUNTERS TO DEVELOP THE B(EA)ST COLLECTION 27 THE B(ea)ST COLLECTION KIT 35 THE B(ea)ST COLLECTION AND ITS AESTHETICS 36 DELIVERABLES 39 CONCLUSIONS 40 TIMELINE 42 BIBLIOGRAPHY 43

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INTRO When people ask me about my thesis project they always expect a simple explanation. But Codesign expresses itself better through the “making” than through words. I will describe in this report how Bibliotekets Skaberværelse Tingbjerg (BST) can be a pilot project to explore and prototype new ways of collaboration between “maker spaces” and libraries. Through fixing, upscaling/upcycling and making from scratch I want to promote new ways of looking at the space and at the community involved.

“Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg - Textile Inquiries” is the title of a 3 month exploration about the potentials and challenges of using the practice of upcycling as an example of making and fixing in libraries. One of the outcomes of this exploration is a selection of upcycled t-shirts called “the B(ea)ST collection”, prototyped as an attempt to engage a group of teenage girls - working with their aesthetical preferences - from Tingbjerg, a neighborhood located 8 kms from the Copenhagen city center.

The B(ea)ST collection is a selection of upcycled t-shirts that are expressions of what is nowadays the impression of eco-fashion and, consequently, upcycled clothes.

The report approaches the theme of upcycling in a public setting as the one of a library. and what kind of awareness it can bring to the community. During my project, I have analysed the phenomenon of fast fashion and how the counterclaim of this contemporary practice can be the concept of fast upcycling and fast fixing. To sustain this concept there are a series of 3 encounters that have helped me develop the idea behind the B(ea)ST collection and prototyping it.

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BACKGROUND This project has been developed entirely in Tingbjerg’s library, and it is part of a bigger project that delves into what can a maker space be within the frame of a public library, that is why you’ll find in this report a section about Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg (or BST). The BST is a space under Tingbjerg’s library where Martin,a fellow co-design master student, and I have been prototyping and exploring what it means to “make” and “fix” inside a library and how this room can become a format for future maker spaces inside libraries in Denmark. The BST has been developed everyday during these 3 months with the help of the librarians in Tingbjerg: Thomas, Tove, Peter, Chaker, Aga and Jeanett.

The BST can be seen as a local and small attempt to develop sustainable activities within Tingbjerg’s context, which encourages a comparison between the BST and the SLOC model proposed by Ezio Manzini.

SLOC is a collection of cosmopolitan ideas of local origin that are focused on small, local system changes that when connected together bring the potential of big system transformation (Fletcher, 2014).

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Within our project frame, Martin and I have been collaborating in other projects as part of the BST, like Fixperts projects - in collaboration with some students from the Industrial Design and Ceramics department at KADK - a project lead by Daniel Charny, a Professor of Design at Kingston University and creative director at From Now On, and the Biblioteket Skaber FixHub Festival, a 3 day festival with many activities and debates about fixing and making that helped us see the potential of the room and its limits.

Consequently I decided to divide my project into 3 main encounters that have helped me developed the idea behind the B(ea)ST collection. These 3 encounters are unattended situations that guided my project throughout the 3 months period. They have been a part of the everyday activity at the BST and while the first one was a planned workshop, the second and third encounters were unexpected situations. The first encounter was a workshop with the Pigeklub of the library, a girls club that meets every Wednesday in the library.

The second encounter happened during a Repair Salon, an open drop-in Mondays fixing session that Martin and I have been prototyping from the beginning of April. The third one was during the Biblioteket Skaber - FixHub Festival, where many women came to fix old clothes during and extended version of the Repair Salon.

The Repair Salons are still ongoing and both me and Martin will continue to attend and host them every Monday until the middle of June.

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REFLECTION ON PRACTICE AND METHODOLOGY During the development of Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg the methodology needed to be adjusted and modified according to the situations and encounters. It was important to follow the ideas and recommendations I got from the Tingbjerg’s residents and the examples of other maker spaces or workshops around the Copenhagen area. At the same time it was important for me to keep focus on my project and aim to promote upcycling activities in Tingbjerg within the frame of the library.

At first I tried to apply exploratory inquiry, the first strategy of the DAIM approach (Halse et al. 2010), using a workbook to start a dialogue with the users of the library, but I soon realised that while the exploratory inquiry is a research without a hypothesis that needs to be tested (Halse et al. 2010), my project was actually searching for somebody that could test my ideas about “upcycling in a library with old clothes” so the try out with the use of the strategy from exploratory inquiry gave me a reason to look for a new approach.

What was then still present from the DAIM approach in my research was a “sustained participation”, where to accomplish a result the designer needs to engage a network in a constant dialogue. (Halse et al. 2010) This second strategy has been used to build a continued dialogue about the transformation of the room and its activities with the volunteers, the librarians and the girls.

And it helped set up the basis for the B(ea)ST collection and the activities that Martin and I have been doing in the space of the BST. “Sustained participation” can be seen as an “active line” through the whole project and is still an ongoing strategy that we are using.

To develop the prototype of the B(ea)ST collection I have also been using the third strategy of the DAIM approach: “generative prototyping”, which is not only about testing if an idea fits the defined goal; it remains also open “for what” we are conducting inquiries for and “how” we are engaging stakeholder networks.

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This characteristic of openness triggered me to make a connection between the DAIM approach and the methodological appendix of the activist-fashion designer Otto Von Busch’s Phd Thesis - Fashion-able (2008) that has inspired my after-thoughts about the approach and strategies that I have been used during the project in Tingbjerg.

Accordingly to Von Busch (2008) “This meshwork methodology consists of nothing than overlapping and displaced lines; of multiplicities connected to other multiplicities where there are no points of culmination, termination or external ends.” (Von Busch 2008; D&G 2004) Otto Von Busch’s methodology can be seen as a metaphor of the materials that I have engaged with in the BST; fabrics and textiles are a surface, a tool, used to make the encounters possible, the encounters are seen in this way as threads that are weaving new ways inside the Tingbjerg library and its upcycling possibility.

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They are not closed threads but open ended ones so that the project can be constantly developed but can never reach a final result. The B(ea)ST collection is then an open-source collection that can be developed with new techniques and patterns and its strength, and at the same time its challenge, is to keep this openness possible and transformable.

Otto Von Busch (2008) is applying to his projects a “Rhizomatic” approach (Von Busch 2008; D&G 2004) where the work of the designer is divided into different action plans that build on the works of others. In my project, the “rhizomatic” approach can be seen as divided in different “action lines” (Busch 2008). The “action lines” are diagonal lines (Von Busch, 2008) that describe the constant collaboration of multiple projects overlapping in the same space and the different nature of the activities: as for example the first Lamp Workshop (a workshop to open up the doors of our space and start making), the iterative sequence of Monday Repair Salons, the FixHub festival, the consecution of workshops with the librarian, and the workshop with the Pigeklub.

Looking at the “sustained participation” it can be described as an action line that goes through the whole project and it’s still on and the generative prototyping as a constant open line of different actions that are iterative and changing continuously the shape of the final outcome. Nevertheless this overlapping of activities and “lines” is what built up and created food for thought about the practice of upcycling and the B(ea)ST collection.

According to O. V. Busch (2008) “We must think of method as a tool to liberate from closure and explode in a multiplicity of lines”(D&G 2004). In this way the B(ea)ST collection becomes a starting point for further investigations around the theme of upcycling in a public library and a creative kit that can be expanded, but only through “sustained participation” and “generative prototyping”.

BIBLIOTEKET SKABERVÆRELSE TINGBJERG The actual first outcome of my project is Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg, developed with Martin, a codesign fellow student from KADK, from the beginning of March 2016 until now. We started with creating a map of stakeholders in Tingbjerg. We wanted them not to feel like we were there just for an interview and then back to our studio, but we wanted them to feel that we wanted to stay and prototype something useful for the community, with the help of the community.

Our strategy was to participate in their arrangements and talk about the project by asking them to help us with it.

BST, or better the space under the library, has been massively developed during these last 3 months. When we stepped in it was just two tables, two sofas and some other structure for the activities that are going on there: the homework café and the girls club (Pigeklub).

There was no need for that room to be more furnished.

With the help of the people engaged in the project, Martin and I have built up a space with materials, tools for fixing, an exhibitor shelf and a cutting table.

I assembled a corner for the exhibition of the B(ea)ST collection and a shelf for fabrics, sewing machines and an overlock ready to be used.

BST is now a space inside the library with books about making solutions, fixing and DIY magazines, a materials library that is open to further development and the possibility to collect more books about making and fixing. It’s a space that has been developed with the library, in collaboration with the librarians but also with the citizens of the neighborhood where Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg is located.

During the development of BST we found out that a strong collaboration with the librarians can open up future scenarios in the new KulturHus, that will be open in Tingbjerg from the 1st of November 2016.

The librarians can have the role of facilitators in some activities, or can engage volunteers who are willing to do a workshop or start a new activity in the space.

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The librarians have been our direct connection with the neighborhood and its inhabitants throughout the project; even when we went out to recruit more people, the fact that we were working in a close collaboration with them helped our recruitment process. They were the first stakeholders that we needed to engage in the prototype of BST. An interesting model connected with what we have been working in Tingbjerg is the one of Ezio Manzini and his SLOC scenario. As Manzini describes in his Small, Local, Open and Connected: Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (2010) the SLOC scenario is “a new scenario that lies at the intersection of three main innovation streams: The green innovation (and the environmentally friendly systems it makes available); the spread of networks (and the distributed, open, peer-to-peer organisations it generates); and the diffusion of creativity (and the original answers to daily problems that a variety of social actors are conceiving and implementing)”.

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The SLOC scenario is a combination of four adjectives: small, local, open and connected; these four are “a mesh of connected local systems, whose small scale makes them comprehensible and controllable by individuals and communities” (Manzini, 2010).

However Manzini defines that “with a much higher degree of connectivity, when the small can be a node within various networks and the local can be open to global flows of people and information, the small is no longer small and a local is no longer local, at least not in traditional terms (Manzini, 2010).

BST can be looked through the lens of the 4 adjectives that Manzini describes: Small, Local, Open and Connected. Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg is small because of its characteristic of being at human scale, a public and open space but at the same time for the exclusive use of the people living in the neighborhood - this is also because of the urbanistic structure; only one street connects Tingbjerg to its surrounding neighborhoods.

It’s local because it benefits from the human power of the neighborhood: the librarians, the citizens coming to fix their stuff and some citizens coming to help out with the fixing. It’s not a “close localism” but it’s looking at the future development of the libraries in Denmark.

It’s also open in the sense that Martin and I are willing to learn from other experiences. and One example can be the confrontation with Dorte Kampp and her workshop: she has been for many years the head of the workshops at Biblioteket Rentemestervej of NordVest, she has been showing us around in her workshop and she gave us some useful tips for our space in Tingbjerg.

BST is also connected to the outside through a website (https://biblioteketskaber.wordpress.com/) and a Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ skabervaerelset/); that is a starting point to promote our project in Denmark and abroad.

We had the possibility to ask Dorte how she organises the different activities of the workshops and how to deal with materials, customers and time. She has been a great help from the starting point of our Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg. We kept that as an example to take inspiration from even if the two spaces are different, and while BST is still trying to keep an openness towards people, timing and materials, it’s interesting to look at Dorte’s workshop where these three elements are highly schematized and organised.

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The recruitment has been really difficult and still now we have to deal with the uncertainty of who is coming, at what time and which kind of object they will want to fix.

Biblioteket Skaberværelse is thus growing as a third space in the neighborhood of Tingbjerg, it’s a space for experimenting, making and fixing but also for growing social values and a new network within the community.

As Routledge (1996) describes the third space is a place of invention and transformational encounters, a dynamic in-between space that is permeated with the traces, relays, ambivalences, ambiguities and contradictions, with the feelings and practices of both sites, to fashion something different, unexpected.

The third space is a field where to work means that our voices can be able to reach somebody from the outside, promote a program that can touch the neighborhood with our ideas and make it flourish. The third space of Tingbjerg is a place for changes, but these changes can be done only through unexpected encounters (Routledge, 1996).

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The room under Tingbjerg’s Library has become, over the 3 months of this project, what Routledge describes as third space: it “implies an intellectual space of creativity, the freedom to invent new ways of conducting our lives, new schemes of representation, different ways to express ourselves”.

What about the unexpected encounters then? One of the characteristics of Biblioteket Skaberværelse is that, more than planning events, the program has drop-in activities and moments when the space is available for fixing objects, finding solutions and upcycling clothes.

Here, in this in-between space, the citizens are free to come and ask for help, help each other or experiment with materials.

Martin and I ended up focusing on a format that is more open because we struggled in recruiting people for our first workshop during March - the lamp workshop - and we realised that most of the people are now coming because they got to know us and feel comfortable to bring their broken objects or just come in for a chat. I will examine and reflect upon unexpected encounters later on the text.

UPCYCLING AS A WAY TO CREATE CONNECTIONS 2.0

A REVISED VERSION OF THE PROGRAM.

As already described in the program of the project my first attempt in the up-cycling world was in the 2014 Winter Fashion Week in Florence, Pitti. I attended a one-week workshop with different Italian designers involved and we were free to develop and prototype every kind of product starting from a pile of flawed clothes and accessories.

From that moment I have been sensible to up-cycling and the concept of reusing old clothes, fixing them or modifying them to make new ones. The problem statement of my project was about the challenges and potentials of upcycling during social encounters with the goal of prototyping a collection of artifacts that are meant to trigger the people living in the neighborhood of Tingbjerg around the themes of fixing, making and up-cycling.

This was the starting point of my project in Tingbjerg.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RECYCLING AND UPCYCLING? As Von Busch (2008) explains in FASHION-able: “recycling is usually a form of downcycling. Material from a once useful or cherished object gets another life as it is cycled one more time through the consumer system on its way to the dump.

Most often the original incarnation had a higher status than the recycled one. [...] Upcycling, is a form of recycling where the second incarnation is higher valued than the material’s original form.” “Every piece that is made according to this method, regardless of how many versions there may be, is a unique piece, because the materials that are used in it are unique”. (Vinken 2005: 143) What are the important characteristics of upcycling and why is it a good practice in a community based project?

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As described in the program of the thesis, the practice of up-cycling has many good peculiarities that are easily explicable through this four steps: You can decide to use (or better, re-use) every kind of material that is available and shape it according to your needs. For example, if somebody has a bunch of t-shirts, they can mix them and make another item out of them and have a totally different final product.

According to Frank (2013) upcycling is a way of saving money and creating something useful and inexpensive or even free; it’s not expensive and it’s a practice that can promote, with a continuous use, an anti-consumerism attitude. According to Binkley (2008) anti-consumerism defines a broad set of ethical and political positions and choices, operating on the everyday level of mundane consumer choices through critical discourses about the market itself, where small decisions serve to anchor subjectivities in constructed and heavily mediated narratives of lifestyle, self-hood, community, and identity.

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Third, “it allows participants to learn new skills and knowledge” (Frank, 2013; Lang, 2013) or to exchange this kind of skills with others. Upcycling allows the maker to be an outsider and not have the pressure of a professional environment where it’s important to create something merchandisable.

Fourth as Gauntlett (2011) argues it creates a sense of community, from a Do-It-Yourself to Do-It- Together mindset. Due to all this properties I think the use of up-cycling can push further the creativity of the participants, upcycling becomes a way to connect.

FAST FASHION FOR FAST UPCYCLING WHAT IS FAST FASHION? “The phrase “fast fashion” refers to low-cost clothing collections that mimic current luxury fashion trends.

Fast fashion helps state deeply held desires among young consumers in the industrialized world for luxury fashion, even as it embodies unsustainability. Trends run their course with lightning speed, with today’s latest styles swiftly trumping yesterday’s, which have already been consigned to the trash bin. (Joy A., J. Sherry, A. Venkatesh, J. Wang and R. Chan. 2012)” An important distinction needs to be done before diving inside of the concept of fast fashion and my vision on fast upcycling as an answer to the unsustainable contemporary practice of fast fashion. As Yunika Kawamura describes in her “An Introduction to Fashion Studies” (2005) the term fashion conveys a number of social meanings, it’s the invisible element included in clothing. Clothing is just the visible, raw material that a person wears.

The term fashion is not only a concept but also a social phenomenon continuously changing and adapting to social change. The contents of fashion are always a manifestation of their epoch (Kawamura, 2005: Koenig, 1973) and they are what we call clothing.

Going back to the concept of fast fashion, many fashion companies are thriving on fast cycles: rapid prototyping, less “cuts” with larger variety and pushing on a more efficient transportation and delivery. There is more focus on merchandising and retail design in the stores than before and there is need of more and more convincing campaigns for communicate the new collections..

But how can the fast fashion industry exist? As explained by Joy, Sherry, Venkatesh, Wang and Chan (2012) in the chapter Fast Fashion, Sustainability, and the Ethical Appeal of Luxury Brands of Fashion Theory, the fast fashion industry [...] exists as a courtesy of such impulsive behavior [of buying new items frequently] employing the planned obsolescence practices recently 25

identified by Guiltinan (2009: 20): limited functional life design and options for repair, design aesthetics that eventually lead to reduced satisfaction, design for transient fashion, and design for functional enhancement that requires adding new product features. Fashion, more than any other industry in the world, embraces obsolescence as a primary goal; fast fashion simply raises the stakes (Joy, Sherry, Venkatesh, Wang and Chan.: Abrahamson 2011). Fast fashion is connected with the level of connectedness that we reached nowadays and with what Bauman (2000) calls “liquid consumption”, that is a reflection of fluid identities and uncertainty typical of our existing society (Joy, Sherry, Venkatesh, Wang and Chan.: Birkley, 2008).

My project can be seen as an attempt to open up a discussion about the concept of fast fashion and the use, during this project, of recycling centers as possible “free-shops” where you don’t know what you will find and, sometimes, if you will find anything at all.

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The “surprise element” due to the fact that there isn’t a pre-designed path in the clothes that is possible to find in the recycling centers is also part of this project and it’s a big challenge to work only with clothes from my closet or found in the recycling center in Tingbjerg or Norrebro.

I decided to work with t-shirts because of the difficulties in having control of the shapes, the lines of the garments and the way they were kept by previous owners.

Therefore, I can control and select specific types of fabrics, decide if it’s worth to keep the garments, wash them and fix them.

The main quality of recycling centers, as spaces where it’s possible to find material for fixing and upcycling clothes, is that it gives you freedom to choose only at the moment in which there are items available to be picked up.

The concept of fast fashion is for me strictly connected with the concept of fast upcycling.

Fast as adjective has never been associated with upcycling before. It’s common to describe as the complete opposite of fast fashion what is called now eco-fashion, or slow fashion (Fletcher, 2008). Slow fashion can be seen as a piece’s inner metronome, the appropriate speed for people, workers and context (Fletcher, 2008). It is connected with the notion of upcycling and my intent is to trigger this connection by promoting a vision of upcycling as something that can be fast and easily accessible.

Later in the report I will unfold the different encounters that brought me to develop this vision of fast fashion for fast upcycling.

It’s possible to read the concept of fast upcycling in a connection with a sustainability of everyday life fixing and making solutions. A sustainability in terms of time, materiality and process. A fast upcycling will take from 10-20 minutes up to 2 hours, maximum. Every kind of fixing needs to have a “double” matter from a sustainable point of view: it’s fast but it also allowed to reuse materials (in this case t-shirts) and learn something about new techniques, in this way as an educational path.

As Seidman (2007: 58) notes “Sustainability is about much more than our relationship with the environment; it’s about our relationship with ourselves, our communities, and our institutions.” Sustainability is something that often is not connected with the notion of fashion but it’s a theme that needs to be discussed (Joy, Sherry, Venkatesh, Wang and Chan., 2012).

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THREE ENCOUNTERS TO DEVELOP THE B(EA)ST COLLECTION THE FIRST ENCOUNTER: ONE AFTERNOON TO DISCOVER WOOLFILLER AND CREATE/ME TEXTILE The first encounter is a workshop organised within the frame of the Pigeklub. very Wednesday a group of girls attends an activity at the library in Tingbjerg, in the room where Martin and I started Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg.

I had the possibility to get to know them at the beginning of the project, late March. After I decided that it was a good idea to try to prototype something with them because they are, with the homework cafè, on of the groups using the space of the Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg. I asked the volunteers the possibility to have a workshop with them on Wednesday 13th of April.

That day I arranged to spend one afternoon with the girls exploring the use of kits for fixing clothes that Daniel Charny, a Professor of Design at Kingston University and creative director at From Now On, gave to me during a meeting. One is the Woolfiller, a kit for autofixing developed by Heleen Klopper.

How does Woolfiller work? “Through embracing the specific character of wool. The fibres of wool contain miniscule scales which open up when they are pricked with a felt needle. The open scales bind with each other and will not be separated. Not even if they are washed. Woolfiller can be used with a special machine or with the hand. It is simple, sustainable and satisfying.

A new solution for an age old problem” (http://www. woolfiller.com/wolplamuur.nl).

The second one is the Create Me/TEXTILE kit by HUMADE, a kit of textile transfer iron-on shapes inspired by the game tangram that can be used for covering stains or closing holes.

At first glance the girls were quite shy and they didn’t want to speak English (after some encounters I realised that some of them can speak English quite fluently) so I needed the translation of Martin through most of the workshop.

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The first one to try the Woolfiller was Kaoutar, a 15 years old girl. As soon as she started to prick an old sweater some of the other girls tried it too.

Kaoutar told me before starting that she is not a “creative person� but then she wanted to make a difficult and big shape: a heart shape on the side of the sweater. While playing with the Woolfiller she said that she had never tried it before and she thought that this practice was a little bit too time-consuming. This made me think about the perception of time that a teenager has nowadays and how they use Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram as platforms for temporary communication. I started to think about developing a kit where all the techniques are fast.

Hafsa, also 15 years old, tried out the CreateMe/ TEXTILE and we realised that was difficult to decide when the iron was at the right temperature and how long it takes for the shape to glue on the t-shirt. The rules written in the kit where really useful but not to apply very precisely.

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Still this was perceived as a challenge and she tried to make more difficult patterns and combination with the help of Kaoutar and the other girls, Mona and Nawal.

From that afternoon I started to develop the B(ea) ST collection from the insights received: it needed to be something fast to fix, there is no need for long reflections and needs to be appealing for the aesthetic of a 15 year-old girl. And the use of Woolfiller and CreateMe/TEXTILE triggered me to find something that could be associated to this kind of fast fixing kits.

THE SECOND ENCOUNTER: DROP IN THE REPAIRATIONS-SALON AND FIX YOUR SHOES. During the first exploration with the girls about fixing, two of them, Hafsa and Sofea, asked me if it was possible to come during one of the Monday Repair Salons and fix their shoes. The Monday Repair Salons are 2 hour sessions in which everybody can drop-in and ask for help to fix something. It started as an experiment to generate a weekly iteration of salons.

Going back to the girls I thought they would never come during an event outside their Pigeklub, but I was wrong. They surprised me because they brought their broken shoes the next Monday Repair Salon session.

Not only did the girls who needed to repair the shoes came, but also some of the others. They seems relaxed and curious about me and how I was going to fix the sneakers that they brought.

None of them could hand sew them. When I finished to fix the first shoe, Kaoutar, one of the girls, exclaimed “Det er smukt! Du kan ikke se noget!” (It’s beautiful!

You cannot see anything) and then I realised that a good fixing for them was an invisible fixing or something that doesn’t look like a way to fix something.

During that encounter I realised how much the aesthetic of an item is important for the person that will wear it.

And how much more important it is for a group of 15 year old girls.

So prototyping the B(ea)ST collection I was concerned about what could look “cool” for a teenager and, at the same time, promote the value of upcycling and reuse of old clothes.

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THE THIRD ENCOUNTER: WHAT IF YOU WANT TO FIX SOMETHING YOU’RE REALLY ATTACHED TO? Another step in the development of the B(ea)ST collection was the Repair Salon - “FixHub Festival” sessions. The FixHub Festival was a 3 days fixing and making festival inside of the library in Tingbjerg. The festival was on May 11th-12th-13th, and it was hosted by the librarians but also organised by Martin and I with the collaboration of Sofia Germani, a codesign fellow student, and Ines Veiga, a PhD student from Lisbon.

During the Reparation salon session, the last day of the festival, I had another of these unexpected encounters (Routledge, 1996) that gave me insights for my research.

Mariam, a young mother living in Tingbjerg since August, came in the day before to fix the jacket of her 13 year old son and showed up again on the last day with one of his brother’s t-shirts, asking me what to do with it. The t-shirt was just a white t-shirt but apparently he was really attached to it and he didn’t want to get rid of it. We decided to use the CreateMe/TEXTILE kit to find a way to cover, with some patterns, all the stains and holes of the t-shirt.

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Mariam told me that her son loves bikes and that she wanted to create a bike shape where there were all the stains. While where there were some holes she just used some geometric shapes to cover them.

At the end of the fixing she was really proud of what she had achieved and I was really amazed about this experiment with a t-shirt that was meaningful for somebody.

All the previous experiments with t-shirts had been with garments found in the recycling centers or in my closet so I was the only one that had a feeling of attachment to them. Helping Mariam fix the t-shirt for her teenage son made me think about how much the fixing can be personal and how the t-shirt become a memory and symbol.

Because of it I started to think about the openness that the B(ea)ST collection should have and how is it possible to reach that openness.

THE B(ea)ST COLLECTION KIT The B(ea)ST collection is a selection of upcycled t-shirts.

All the materials are second hand clothes found in my closet, in my friends’ closets, or in recycling centers - or even donated by Linda, a social worker from Kontakten, a center where mentally or socially challenged people can find help. These t-shirts are developed to be part of a creative open source “creative kit” that will be given to the library. The toolkit contains a few different techniques to modify t-shirts. Every technique is fast and can be done in a time frame of 30 minutes up to 2 hours.

These fast techniques have focused on 3 points: the first one is using old t-shirts or similar fabric material for the modifications; I chose to use the t-shirts as an example of common material that is easy to find, recycle and doesn’t need particular tools for being sewed, by hand or by machine. Another reason why I chose to reuse and upcycle t-shirts is because it’s really common to find them in everybody’s closet. The t-shirt goes beyond ethnicity, culture, religious garments. It has different shapes but can fit everybody.

The second point I focused on was to use only recycled materials to make the collection able to talk with a particular aesthetic and create a sense of uniqueness for every piece.

The only new materials in use are the threads used in the sewing machine or in the hand sewing; the paper for models is recycled or comes from magazines that are going to be thrown away.

The third point is about attempting to go beyond the polished aesthetic of brand new clothes and embracing a new “everyday” aesthetic. The project was at the beginning meant to be developed with a group of skilled women between 35-60 but I ended up working and asking for feedback a group of girls around 15 years old.

As every teenager they are inclined to follow H&M and big companies that are promoting a fast way of making use of fashion. And from our encounters I realized that they are really concerned about the ugliness of the fixing that is closer to an aesthetic of everyday life and not similar to the polished image of brand new clothes from big storesbrands. Because of all these reasons the items need to look not new but catchy and appealing.

And they have a particular aesthetics.

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THE B(ea)ST COLLECTION AND ITS AESTHETICS The B(ea)ST collection is a selection of upcycled t-shirts that are direct expression of what is nowadays the perception about the term sustainable fashion ( and, consequently, upcycled clothes). The name: B(ea)ST has a strong connection with the place where they have been prototyped, Biblioteket SkabervĂŚrelse Tingbjerg (with the acronym of BST) and gives an appeal of what is the aesthetic behind the garments.

According to Joy A., J. Sherry, A. Venkatesh, J. Wang and R. Chan. in the chapter Fast Fashion, Sustainability, and the Ethical Appeal of Luxury Brands (2012) between young generations there is awareness about environmental issues, sustainability in terms of energy consumption but unfortunately this awareness is not present when the topic is fashion. There the aesthetic, the appeal of a garment comes first than the energies used to produce it.

Sustainable fashion is perceived as boring, basic and not really fashionable, organic materials means also a limit in pattern and colors and slow fashion, that encourages slower production schedules, fair wages, lower carbon 38

footprints, and (ideally) zero waste is most of the time too expensive and not disposable, can be kept for more time and in this way the risk is that it becomes obsolete (Joy A., J. Sherry, A. Venkatesh, J. Wang and R. Chan.

2012).

As these t-shirts are an attempt to fulfill the fashion taste of a new generation of consumers without the consumerist part. In my case study the target is a group of girls attending the Pigeklub every Wednesday at the library of Tingbjerg.

The Pigeklub has every week a different activity going on for the girls. They are the one deciding which kind of activity they prefer to attend.

During the encounter with the girls we ended up talking about what are their habits when they are going to buy something new and what happens when this item start to be a little bit old and obsolete. Their answer was that they usually buy new clothes as soon as the ones that they have are old, not fashionable anymore, with holes or a little bit washed-up. I then ask them what are they doing with the old clothes and they told me that they just throw them away.

I asked them what if they needed to fix something and then they were really concern about the fixing as something that you should not see, something invisible.

Because of it I decided to play with the B(ea)ST collection in opposition to this way of looking at fixing old clothes.

I decided to use an “aesthetics of ugliness” (K. Rosenkranz, 1853) but instead of thinking at the concept of “ugliness” as inverse of beautiful, a form that cannot be sensual or attractive (K. Ronsenkranz: S. Haubner, 2011) I decided to experiment how the idea of B(ea) ST can generate appealing outcomes in fashion and upcycling.

This aesthetics of ugliness becomes in my project in Tingbjerg an aesthetics of everyday life that is less polished and new than the clothes that is possible to see in the shops of H&M. According to Caroline O’Donnell (2011) in the introduction of Aesthetic of Ugliness. Log, (22) “ugliness is first the negation of total unity and formal definitude.

But perhaps more importantly, while the mere absence of form is neither beautiful nor ugly, formlessness becomes ugliness where content should have form but is missing it, or where form is not yet adequately developed”.

According to this concept of ugliness as something that does not have the form that it was supposed to have, the B(ea)ST collection is a collection of fast techniques using the idea of the “unfinished/visible detail” as a really present fixing on the surface of the garment. All the t-shirts upcycled had something to fix and what needed to be fixed is visible or covered with patches and shapes that suggests that “something” is hidden behind the fabric.

This is in some way going against the insights that I have received from the encounters with the girls from the Pigeklub that it can also work as a trigger to develop their awareness about creative sustainable solutions for their everyday.

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DELIVERABLES At the moment, the deliverables of this project are multiple: the B(ea)ST collection it’s a selection of examples for an open-source creative tool kit to upcycle t-shirts with different techniques. These techniques are divided in sub-kits at the moment: - The instructions-kit for making fabric yarn from old t-shirts, it can be used for sewing, knitting and weaving.

- The create me/TEXTILE kit with iron-on shapes to close holes and cover stains.

- The Wollfiller kit with needles and felted wool - The create me/TEXTILE kit with iron-on shapes to close holes and cover stains.

- The kit to make diamonds shapes, sewed all in different ways to give an unique appeal to the t-shirt.

- The traditional smocking technique used to make asymmetrical fabric manipulation on the t-shirts.

All the creative tool kit is an open ended outcome that can be modified and improved; together with the creative tool kit and the B(ea)ST collection, there will be a photo-book documenting the details of the collection, the inspirations, the materials and some of the encounters occurred within the frame of the BST.

CONCLUSIONS Biblioteket Skaberværelse Tingbjerg is a pilot project developed in collaboration with the library and the neighborhood of Tingbjerg. It’s a pilot project because of its characteristic openness and experimental approach towards upcycling, fixing and making and engaging the community around the library.

It can be seen as a third space because it’s developed as a place of invention, creativity and transformational encounters. The BST can also fit in the SLOC scenario presented by Ezio Manzini about small, local realities that are tough open and connected towards a global audience. My own personal approach on the BST is about upcycling clothes and exploring the notion of fast fashion and fast upcycling with a group of teenagers using the Tingbjerg Library regularly. The outcome of this collaboration is a selection of upcycled garments and an open-source creative tool kit of techniques for upcycling t-shirts and learn how to reuse the fabrics.

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TIMELINE

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Busch, O. V. 2008. Fashion-able. Hacktivism and engaged fashion design. School of Design and Craft; Gothenborg.

Fletcher, K., 2014. “Sustainable fashion and textiles: design journeys” Second edition, London; Sterling Halse, J., Brandt, E., Clark, B. and Binder, T. 2010, Rehearsing the Future. The Danish Design School Press. pp. 26-27

Joy A., J. Sherry, A. Venkatesh, J. Wang and R. Chan.

2012. “Fast Fashion, Sustainability, and the Ethical Appeal of Luxury Brands.” Fashion Theory pp. 273–296.

[Taylor & Francis Online] http://www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.2752/175174112X13340749707123#.

V0U28-d968o

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Kawamura, Y. 2004. Fashion-ology: an introduction to fashion studies. Berg. pp. Ix-18 57-72 Manzini E. 2010. Small, Local, Open and Connected: Design Research Topics in the Age of Networks and Sustainability,” Journal of Design Strategies, Volume 4, No. 1, Spring Rosenkranz, K., & Haubner, S. 2011. Aesthetic of Ugliness. Log, (22), pp. 101-111.

Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765715 Routledge, P. 1996. The Third Space as Critical Engagement. Antipode, 28:4, pp. 399-419

Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering

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