Jugalbandi – Designed and Made in Australia and India

The aim of this exhibition is to explore new opportunities for Australian art, craft and design through creative dialogue with India. The principle of this dialogue is the understanding that no culture is sufficient to itself. Each culture has certain biases which prompt those within to seek values from other cultures that complement its deficiencies. In Australian craft, we have seen this in the influence of Japanese wood-fired ceramics, which provided a sensitivity to natural process otherwise missing in an Anglo culture. What what might India in the 21 century contribute to Australian culture, and vice versa?

The title Jugalbandi is used as an initial starting point. It refers to a duet in Indian music were performers from two different traditions, such as Carnatic and Hindustani, play together. Its literal meaning is ‘entwined twins’, which evokes the pre-history of Australia and India as once connected in Gondwana.

This exhibition will feature a variety of Australian artists, craftspersons and designers, including some established but with a particular focus on those emerging. The prime venue will be the gallery at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, which will coincide with the Australian Year of India.

In the lead up to this, there will be a series of pop-up exhibitions during Sydney Design Week in August 2012. Venues for this will include the Powerhouse Museum, COFA and the new India Cultural Centre. The plan is then to take this back to Australia for an exhibition in 2013.

I am interested to hear from others involved in this exchange across the Indian ocean. I hope that Jugalbandi provided a platform for experimental creative dialogues between two quite opposite cultures.

Designing with the Neighbours in Mind: Unlimited Asia Pacific

Unlimited Asia Pacific is a platform for the Queensland state government to join Victoria as a leading force in Australia’s emergent design economy. While the Victorian State of Design Festival is focused on state-based activity, Unlimited triennial builds on the work of its visual arts sister, the Asia Pacific Triennial, to position design within the wider region. The question is: What does Unlimited add to the APT?

Unlimited offers promising opportunities. The APT deals largely in the cultural reflections in our region, questioning stereotypes and familiarising ourselves with a contemporary Asia Pacific sensibility. Despite massive audience numbers in Brisbane, participation from the region is likely to be limited to those with the resources to engage in visual arts. Unlimited offers the possibility of partnership beyond the performance of cultural difference—it engages in the everyday life of the region.

Besides its relevance to our dialogue with the Asia Pacific, Unlimited coincides with the birth of the Australian Design Alliance as a lobbying group to promote design as a capacity across government. This design push takes aligns itself with the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, which has historically supported the crafts. It argues that ‘Australia should keep pace with the rest of the world in generating creative capital through innovative ideas, product differentiation and systems effectiveness.’

From a government perspective, support for design is seen a business-friendly initiative. The focus of the Queensland event reinforces the link to economic growth – the theme of the 2010 Unlimited festival is ‘opportunity’.

Yet the concerns are not purely profit-driven. There is much in the program that focuses on improving social condition in the region. One of the great successes of Unlimited was Bunker Roy, of Barefoot College, who received two standing ovations for his account of the south-south enterprise teaching grandmothers to become solar engineers. Cases studies of ‘Design in Action’ mostly focused on needs of poor communities in the Asia Pacific region.

But sometimes business and development combined uneasily. There’s a growing school of thought, reflected in C.K. Prahalad’s Bottom of the Pyramid, that a win-win scenario for global North and South can be created by harnessing informal economies in poor countries to the efficiencies of global capital. Mark Ingram from Millennium Business Development told the story of a village in the highlands of PNG, where responsible women farmers were contrasted with indulgent men wasting their time in body decoration and spear-sharpening.

While few today would argue for the interests of men above women, MBD can be seen as advocating a missionary approach. This kind of business development isolates the primitive elements of a culture off from its progressive capacities. It’s doubtful that MBD would overtly identify as imperialist, but critical discussion is important to clarify its aims.

Unlimited has some important issues to work through. Given the urgency of poverty, perhaps cultural identity is an unnecessary romance. Conversely, the prioritising of economy above culture may itself be specific to a Western world view that focuses more on the future than the past.

If it were to articulate such issues, Queensland’s Unlimited would not only position the state in this growing region but also play a leading role in a national conversation about our place in the world beyond. Figures like Noel Pearson have alerted us to these issues within Australia, now we are finding resonant voices from our neighbours outside.

Links

The Unlimited Asia Pacific website http://unlimitedap.com contains a full range of videos of presentations from the event; a visit is highly recommended.

Australian Design Alliance http://www.design.org.au

Originally published in Artlink vol 30 no 4, 2010

Review of Design through Making

Design Through Making edited by Bob Sheil, Wiley-Academy Vol 75 No. 4 July/August 2005

Design Through Making promises a fresh take on the role of construction in architecture and related design practices. The principal argument of the publication is that new technology enables greater involvement of architects in the construction process. Software such as CAD grants the architecture more control over how ideas are realised. While these developments increase the power of the architect, the new appreciation of making also affords more collaborative possibilities.

There are some interesting practices mentioned that invite a more reciprocal relationship. In Mark Burry’s ‘Homo Faber’ article on a Gaudi reconstruction, he writes that ‘the craftsperson is judged as a crucial partner to the digital dialogue.’ Nick Callicott describes his practice with Kris Ehlert in developing advanced fabrication techniques (‘Adaptive Architectural Design’). He argues that the work ‘required a reassociation of knowledge and skill, and the need to operate in a wholly collaborative manner with engineers, fabricators and users.’ (p.69) This appreciation of the skills involved in realising architectural designs is welcome. But one can’t help but wish it would go further. It would have been good to invite contributions from the technicians, craftspersons and others involved in giving form to what’s on paper.

Though not advocating collaboration, there are some articles that acknowledge the importance of the making experience to architectural practice. An article about architectural education (Mark Prizeman ‘Hooke Park As a New AA Initiative in Education’) argues for the importance of practical experience in professional training. Prizeman writes, ‘Good design is, like drawing, a question of how hard one looks at something… Designing by making takes observation to a greater emotional and intellectual involvement with the developing product of one’s musing than the distancing of a drafting process.’ (p.56) It is refreshing to see some allowance of the importance of haptic experience, despite the increasing sophistication of screen-based activities.

Perhaps the most radical case in this collection is the development of DIY architecture. Craig Kellog’s article ‘Just build’ documents an intriguing new paradigm that has architects actually building their own constructions. Whether this turns out to be a New York fad, or a sign of greater teamwork in professional life, will be interesting to see.

That Architectural Design should devote an issue to Design Through Making says something quite important about the evolution of architectural practice in Britain. Closer to home, it evokes an event held last century at the Meat Market in 1988. Organised by Deidre Missingham and Alex Selenitsch, Collaborative Designs: Working together in Architecture featured a wide range of partnerships active in that time between designing and making. John Cherry’s reception desk for Howard Raggatt is an example of how making skills can add a new perspective to architecture. How wonderful it would be to have a similar survey of collaborations today.

Design Through Making indicates an important argument current in architecture about the limits of screen tools. For some, CAD programs enable the architect to acquire supreme control over the minutia of the building process. For others, there is a renewed appreciation of the tactile involvement of making in the realisation of successful design. This is an important argument and one that I hope makers themselves will have a voice in.

Sangam – Australia-India Design Platform

1. A Platform for Creative Partnership

The Australia-India Design Platform is a three-year program of parallel forums, workshops and pilot study. It aims to build a common understanding between Australia and India about how designers and artisans might work productively together. This platform is a step towards the development of a Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations, which will create new opportunities for designers and craftspersons by supporting the ethical and storied value of cultural products.

This Platform will be built on mutual respect, frank discussion, creative play and a focus on long-term outcomes for both designers and artisans.

2. Aims: Sharing ideas and skills

  • To create new opportunities for designers and artisans
  • To consolidate existing experience about Australia-India partnerships
  • To develop innovative strategies for cultural sustainability
  • To find a contemporary understanding between Australia and India, village and city
  • To contribute to the development of the Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations

3. Program

a. Map a consensus through the life-cycle of product development

b. Pilot study

To test out the consensus with a particular traditional craft:

  • Residency for Australian designer
  • ARC Linkage research evaluating its progress

c. Case studies

To share knowledge gained by those who have experience working in both countries:

  • Online profiles
  • Online discussion forum

4. Partnerships

  • Academic partner: Ethical Design Laboratory
  • Industry partners: Australian Craft and Design Centres, including Craft Australia and Craft Victoria; National Association of the Visual Arts; Arts Law
  • International partners: Icograda, World Craft Council
  • Indian Partners: Craft Revival Trust, Jindal Global Law School, National Institute of Design, Craft Council of India, Delhi Arts Residency
  • The Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations will be administered by the New Traditions Foundation

This project is currently open to partnerships with organisations that are engaged with product development. There is also interest in potential partners who are interested in providing venues for discussion, both real and online.

For more information, please visit www.sangamproject.net. For a philosophical context for this, please visit www.thetwohandsproject.net.

Do you want ethics with that? New platforms for designing trust

Keynote for ConnectED Conference, University of New South Wales June 2010

My apologies first. This is not an academic paper. I won’t bring you an exciting new theory or methodology. What I hope to offer you is an emerging context for design. As the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji says, ‘culture is not only a heritage, it is a project.’ The project in this case is to find a platform for ethical design that is more than window dressing, but offers real possibility for collaboration between the two halves of the world. To be successful, this project will need design educators to prepare students for the opportunities ahead.

So let me lay out the problem.

Which chocolate do you choose?

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Let’s start with a familiar dilemma. You’re having a dinner party tonight. You decide it would be nice to offer your guests some chocolate with coffee after dinner. At the supermarket, you find there are two shelves of chocolates. The bottom shelf promises exotic flavours and organic ingredients. It guarantees to please the taste-buds of your dear friends. But the upper shelf tells a different story. These are Fair Trade chocolates, which may not taste better, but offer a better deal for the people who produced them. Which do you choose?

Increasingly, people are choosing Fair Trade. Why? It could be because they are noble minded and genuinely like to improve the lot of mankind. Yes, that would be nice, but we know human foibles too well these days. Perhaps they are aware of the global inequity. But our inner cynic suggests that rather than confront it by donating large amounts of excess cash, they prefer the easy way out—to assuage their conscience while indulging their appetites at the same time. Alternatively, perhaps they are more concerned to impress their guests. Nowadays, there’s kudos in being seen to support a social cause, whether it’s indigenous welfare or global poverty. Inserting some Fair Trade chocolate after dinner is a subtle way of making the right impression.

Whether you subscribe to the idealistic or cynical reading, ethics is becoming an increasingly important element in consumption. In this paper, I’d like to trace one particular ethical theme as it emerged from colonisation and examine where it might be leading in the future.

Global justice is ‘so 80s’

The very positive story of globalisation as opening societies and markets to international exchange has also unlocked the negative story of obvious inequity in the distribution of resources. This is the story of the ‘other half’—how the North discovered the great potential for wealth in the South and developed strategies for acquiring and keeping it.

As a lucky country, the efforts of colonisers in Australia were rewarded with rich mines and fertile farms, particularly for sheep and cattle. But not everyone was so fortunate. It was the role of missionaries to help those ‘unlucky ones’ dispossessed from their land for the sake of national prosperity. They were not there to stop the march to progress, but as Daisy Bates expressed it, to ‘smooth the pillow of the dying race’. The principle theme here is pity for the inevitable victims of progress.

Since then we’ve become a little more ambivalent about Western civilisation. Indigenous peoples are seen to represent not only an inevitable casualty of our greed, but also a common humanity. It was the Beatle, George Harrison, who in 1971 initiated the alliance between popular music and global suffering with A Concert for Bangladesh, to help victims of the Bangladesh Liberation War. The story of popular charity reached a peak in the mid-eighties, with Bob Geldof’s Band-Aid concerts to aid famine relief in Ethiopia and Michael Jackson’s We are the World, the fasted selling single of all time, dedicated to raising money for Africa.

While noble in its time, such popular gestures seem naive in retrospect. They were big on symbolism and camaraderie, but the link to practical gains was never clear. In retrospect, we might call them, ‘feel good exercises.’

The 21st century heralded a realism in popular mass philanthropy. In 2005, the Make Poverty History campaign, led by celebrities like Bono, targeted the G8 Summit in Gleneagles with a mass campaign involving concerts and silicone awareness bracelets. It was focused on specific systemic reforms, such as the cancellation of debt to third world countries.

While commendable in its realism, such campaigns are vulnerable to the criticism that they imply an image of a passive South that requires the intervention of the all-powerful North. One unfortunate side-effect of such an asymmetrical arrangement is a ‘compassion fatigue’. Our spirits sink at yet another image of starving children with bloated bellies.

Recently, we have seen an attempt to counter the ‘do-gooder’ appeal of philanthropy by making it sexy. The issue of Vanity Fair that Bono edited contained positive stories about a creative and optimistic Africa. And there are now many fashion companies that are marketing their third world roots, such as Juno, a company in New York that places Kenyan fabrics on the cat walk. But this path is inherently unsustainable, as the very feature of fashion is its temporary nature. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.’

With such changes in the nature of popular philanthropy, it is easy to reduce it to the fashions of the day. While we might be pleased that celebrities find it fashionable to align themselves with the fight against poverty in Africa, we know that fashion is cyclical and there will be an inevitable reaction against this in time. Oxfam have sensed this danger and countered with a new campaign that makes a virtue of 80s retro embarrassment, saying ‘giving never goes out of fashion.’ While fashion offers a way out from the smugness of global ‘do-gooders’, it is a particularly fickle conduit for exchange between North and South.

Where does design fit into this? During the history of this popular philanthropy, the world of design tended to be identified with the world of excess. The designer world was one of luxury and splendour available to only a few. But this changed in the mid-2000s. This turn-around for design reached its mea culpa moment with the confession in 2007 of Philippe Starke on the TED video site.

Design has a new global sense of responsibility. In 2007, entrepreneur Paul Polak founded Design for the other 90%, which became a touring exhibition starting at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. He argued that, ‘The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.’ Design for the other 90% resonates with the Make Poverty History campaign in two ways. First, it re-directs focus of our energies away from personal wealth-making to global justice. Second, it looks for practical solutions rather than symbolic gestures. But as with global philanthropy, this movement is vulnerable to the criticism that it reproduces an essentially unequal world of passive South and creative North.

New platforms

So how do we get ourselves out of this cycle? The solution, in one way, is quite simple, but also breathtakingly complex. The missing piece in this is the voice of the person who is the subject of this attention—the Global South. Has anyone asked them what they want? It’s widely recognised that the global balance is changing and that nations once silenced by poverty are now leading players on the world stage, such as China, India and Brazil. A great challenge for our time is to find a platform on which we can develop North-South dialogue. Such a platform should not just be a conduit for Western aid, but it should also be a reciprocal medium for exchange.

While celebrities have been putting Africa in the spotlight, on the sidelines there are less glamorous but arguably more effective conduits for development. These are alternative economic and value systems that attempt to factor in more than just market values for consumers. They seek to include also the experience of the producers themselves.

Fair Trade

During the 20th century, the Fair Trade movement has evolved quietly in suburbs and villages to provide consumers with a brand that assures them they are supporting the interests of third world producers. Rather than a mere gesture of support, Fair Trade attempts to embed itself in the economic system and so align consumption with philanthropy.

Fair Trade began in 1950 as a program by the Mennonite Church in the United States to further their missionary aims. It eventually shed its religious associations and became a branded product.The first Fair Trade consumer label was launched in 1988 by the Dutch company, Max Havelaar in partnership with a Mexican cooperative. During the mid 2000s, ­­Fair Trade sales of coffee and chocolate increased at a rate of around 50% a year. The advantage of Fair Trade is that it extends a common standard of labour conditions across the entire range of products. But this very standardisation makes it difficult to generalise in the design area, where one size does not fit all.

Chain of Custody

More specific to the design area are codes that relate to materials finding their way into finished products. The Chain of Custody was developed so that when you buy a piece of furniture you can know something about the conditions in which the timber was produced.

The Forestry Stewardship Council, through its accredited organisations, tracks the journey of material across the production process, from the forest to the consumer. It covers problems that may arise in unethical practices, such as illegal harvesting, violation of civil rights, endangering land of biological or cultural value, sourced from natural or genetically modified forest. Certification covers all stages of the process, from forestry, milling, manufacture and sale.

It’s an expensive process, costing around $50,000 plus travel expenses for creditors. But expense is worth it for high-volume companies that can add value through this ethical stamp. While useful in tracking ethics through a supply chain, the Chain of Custody is specific to material worth. It does not apply to intellectual property, which is one of the main components of design value.

World of Good

The World of Good platform sustains a particular set of concepts for reflecting the ethical value of goods. World of Good was founded in 2004 by two business graduates of Indian descent from Berkeley. Priya Haji and Siddharth Sanghvi . With companies such as Disney and Hallmark, they developed mainstream retail product lines for third world artisans. Earlier this year, their brand and related assets were acquired by ebay. Now the World of Good site within ebay offers products made by poor communities around the world.

There are many such online retailers of third world products, but World of Good is distinct in the development of a platform that commodifies trust as a component of the final product. World of Good works with organisations known as Trust Providers, who provide a guarantee that the products they are selling are of genuine philanthropic benefit. These benefits are divided into social and natural. The overall system is known as trustology. An essential component of the trustology is what is known as the ‘goodprint’ that includes details of the product’s positive moral impact. It’s like a food ingredient label, except for ethics.

So with the case of the Cotton Rounded Hill Tribe shoulder bag, the seller has been verified by the Trust Provider known as Empowerment Works. The product’s goodprint includes ‘a cooperative organisation’, ‘produced communally by women in a minority tribal group’ and made ‘from biodegradable materials.’

As a trading platform, ebay enables communication between buyer and seller, as well as a rating system. World of Good has a parallel capacity for dialogue. Each seller has a section on the site where they can communicate with the buyer. However, the basic moral lie of the land is a world of good rich people purchasing goods from grateful poor people. The potential for exchange is quite constrained.

The Two Hands Project

There is a third platform that is currently in development. This is being developed to support an informal dialogue occurring in the world of design. Many designers are now working with traditional communities in product development. The idea is to generate economic growth in a way that does not harm communities, as would be the case with resource extraction or sweatshops. In many cases, traditional crafts have lost their local markets, due to globalisation, and thus have to export their goods if they are to survive. Here designers come providing information about urban markets so that goods can be adapted to fit retail demands.

Take the example of the work by German jeweller designer Martin Dempf. In Rwanda there was a rich tradition of basket-making using papyrus grass involving dynamic designs. With the introduction of plastic bags, baskets were no longer necessary and thus they were no longer being made. The traditional craft was being forgotten. As part of a German development mission, Martina conducted workshops with women to refine the techniques and adjust the designs so that they could be converted into jewellery. Martina was then able to commission finely woven components from the women that she frames in silver. At the same time, the women have developed their own product line of jewellery without silver that they market through a website. Thus a cultural practice make obsolete through globalisation is revived through its transposition into an alternative format for export.

A parallel collaboration is occurring here in Sydney with Koskela designs, who commission Indigenous basket-weavers from Elcho Island to create covers for lampshades that they market for high-end clients. While basket-making is not so endangered as in Rwanda, its production is quite limited to specialist collectors. Koskela enables a bridge between the remote island community and the inner sanctum of corporate Australia.

We know that whenever solutions seem too ideal, it awakens our inner-cynic. While the stories that are associated with such products are generally positive, they don’t bear too close attention. Questions begin to arise. How do the women feel about this process? Is it humiliating to be working the primitive way while their neighbours are off getting an education to be part of the workforce? What was the creative involvement of the women? Was the design created solely by the designer, or was there input from the producers as well?

There is a project currently underway to consider how a stable platform might be developed for both designers and producers. The aim of the Two Hands Project is to open up the question of how the world of design relates to the world of production, art to craft, writing to printing, etc. The main vehicle for this is a Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations, which concerns itself with how a creator and a producer come to an arrangement in working together, and how this is communicated to the consumer. But its realisation extends naturally to a network of designers and communities interested in working together, as well as a forum for discussing critical issues. The Code is intrinsically open-ended, subject to constant review. For instance, there is much discussion at the moment about whether the use machine-tools is a good or bad thing for craft. Views may well change with time, particularly as we understand better the experience of the producer.

The Code itself is based on a UNESCO report, Designers Meet Artisans publication, which sought to present an equitable relationship between the traditional producers and the representatives of urban markets. The first iteration of the Code of Practice is limited to the Asia Pacific region. It will hopefully facilitate the increasing number of partnerships between creative practitioners from Australian urban centres and communities in Indigenous Australia and the Asia Pacific. These creative practitioners include artists, designers and retailers who are taking advantage of the relatively cheap skilled craft labour in countries like Indonesia, India and Vietnam, to produce finely made goods, like the sculptures by Rodney Glick that you might have seen at Cockatoo Island in the Sydney Biennale. There is great potential for both sides in these partnerships. For traditional communities, they have the opportunity to engage their distinct craft skills with the urban experience. Here is potential for the younger generation, otherwise draw inexorably to the cities for their future, to find a means of taking something of their distinct identity with them. And for urban markets, these partnerships offer some relief from the sterile factory processes and connection with traditional values that are important for connections between people and their place.

One of the considerations in such a code is the moral rights of producer. Since the Berne Convention, we have come to accept the moral rights of the creator in areas like attribution. However, the contribution of the producer is left to the whim of the marketing department—with the notable exception of the film industry. This hierarchy is based on the presumption that the contribution of the creator is unique, while its realisation is incidental. This is no doubt the case in many instances, and underpins the process of out-sourcing that has seen manufacturing move to China. But with skills shortages in the West, it is becoming increasingly apparent that craft plays a critical role in creative industries. At a recent UNESCO meeting, the creative director of Lanvin said that he may have to close his haute couture operation because his cutter was retiring and he couldn’t find anyone to replace her. In such cases where skills exercise a critical agency in the design process, it seems better for all that they are accredited and others are encouraged to pursue the honourable backstage crafts.

The Code is designed as a platform for carrying the information of the creative process from the site of production to its consumption. It will contain information about materials, cultural meanings and innovations.

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All good, but perhaps too good. On their own, these elements do little to change the basic lie of the land, where producers labour away making delightful and intriguing objects for the enjoyment of the consumers. Perhaps such a platform can do a little more than provide the ethical consumer with information about their purchase.

Ethics beyond consumption

We see all these platforms developing that provide us with information about the worthiness of the production, but what about consumption? Why does ethical design end at the shop counter?

Along with the customer always being right, it is a taken for granted aspect of our economy that control over goods effectively ceases once the shrink-wrap is broken. We have an ethically made, sustainable product, but what guarantee is there that the consumer will keep to that spirit. Yet clearly one of the great problems in our world is rampant consumption, aided by high product disposability.

One possible answer lies in the legal system, where there exists a particular instrument that seeks to limit the use to which a purchase may be used. The covenant is a constraint exercised on the purchaser. Someone may, for instance, place a covenant on the sale of land so that it be maintained as a wilderness. The West Australian Department of Environment and Conservation provides assistance in those placing perpetual conservation covenants on their land.

A covenant-like system can be found in the area of intellectual property. Through Creative Commons, otherwise copyrighted material is freely available to anyone on the proviso that they use this material only for non-commercial purposes.

There’s an interesting experience applying this principle to jewellery. The Melbourne-based jeweller Vicki Mason has designed a series of brooches that carry a message about communal gardens as a practical step towards Australia becoming a republic. If you see someone wearing one of these, and express admiration for it, then you are likely to be given it. But it will be given to you only if you agree to the same condition, once someone else praises it.

Mason’s project introduces the economy of the gift, whereby an object given to you for free usually entails obligation of reciprocation. Some community projects now entail producing cheap objects to be distributed for free thus creating a sense of obligation in the recipient to give something back, as in the case of the Tsunamika doll produce by Upasana in India.

Luck

But given the sacred precept that the customer is always right, where might be the appeal of the covenant. To explore its potential, there is a project currently underway called Southern Charms which concerns the relatively neglected element of design—luck. To an extent, depending on chance seems the antithesis of the whole design project, yet it is very much an ongoing condition of life.

Traditionally, most jewellery served to either protect the user against misfortunate or ensure good luck for the future. A number of objects survived into the modern era, such as crucifixes. We associate these with superstition. We no longer believe that our fate is controlled by gods, angels or demons. Yet, we still persist in believing in luck. We say ‘good luck with…’

What is this luck? It essentially pertains to a venture where we cannot be sure of the outcome. There are many that we face individually, such as going for a job interview or undergoing cancer treatment. But there are also those that we face collectively, particularly climate change.

The Southern Charms project is about adapting traditional charms to contemporary problems. We are currently in the workshop phase. There have been workshops in Chile concerning responses to earthquake. The Melbourne workshop will deal with the threat of bushfires. The Sydney workshop, occurring this afternoon, has its own particular condition.

In designing for luck, the origins of the object are particularly important—who gave it to you and how it was produced. But its effectiveness also depends on its use. More esoteric objects require a recitation. Chinese charms often need to be place in particular parts of the house. And in most cases they need to be worn to be effective. It’s a fascinating challenge as it seems to go against basic principles of modern design, which aim for durability and adaptability, or smartness. ‘Power objects’ require the intervention of users to be effective. While this might seem a burden, think of the appeal of other household items such as pets and plants, whose very need for our attention is part of their appeal.

Skills for the future design challenge

I’d like to conclude on a note of appeal. In order to realise the potential of a platform like this, particular skills are required. Theoretically, we need an ecological design thinking that can encompass the entire product cycle, including the act of consumption. This will include resources such as Actor Network Theory. Methodologically, we need designers skilled in a creative diplomacy, who can build the trust that is essential to creative partnerships. Much of this can be drawn from the discipline of anthropology, which has learnt the art of patience in reading carefully from a community before jumping to conclusions. And finally, we need students with a curiosity not only about the future but also the past. There is much to be gained in recovering objects that once played such an important part in our lives, like lucky charms, to consider their role and whether can be remade for our urban lifestyles.

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For this purpose, we need designers who aren’t necessarily going to invent magical new objects that drop from the sky. These new designers will be like bridges between two worlds, the North and the South, rich and poor, consumer and producer—two worlds that constitute our increasingly shrinking planet.