 You probably know me. I'm Josh Jordan. I'm the director of the making studio here at Chesape and my real job today is to introduce our guest speakers via introducing our guest organizer So before before I do that I also get introduced and sort of formally open the shops for the semester it's kind of a tradition where I get to tag along for awesome events at the beginning of the year So lucky me and welcome back or welcome everybody. So if you're a student here, you probably already know what the making studio is It's the collection of fabrication oriented shop spaces and academic program that overlaps with these spaces. I take the opportunity to introduce it to our guests as well But we've just spent the entire evening in the major space with a number of GSAP students and alums talking about their practices Talking about our student work eating drinking beer amongst 3d printers recovering from jet lag new semester lag So I think most of my instructions are sort of out of the way for anybody else who isn't familiar with the Fabrication side that part of the institution of Chesape. I hope you can piece it together from just this little while So it's popular to describe organizations in terms of community of people that make them up Rather than the mission publicity that I think that the making studio as it is is really no different And so after three years three plus three and change years here as a director of the space I just recently took mental stuff what that community sequel who's overlapped with the shops is it's enormous So there's the 45 something students that work there. I'm thinking semester Which includes the lungs of the shop. It's a number that it's in its hundreds already Even in just a night time here. There's still current GSAP students who are previous crew We now populate studios and T.A. jobs or act as regular civilians at school There's that group of precious shop or it's shop-connected studio mates of yours that you can bribe or guillotine to get All know they are There's the people who spend more time in the shops than some of our actual shop Monitors and contribute in very ed ways even without any paid There's the singularly talented students at GSAP who stick to studio and don't actually use the shops much at all But they might come through once or twice in their time here. It's something amazing out Basically There's our new iPhone s live although that might be in health data But we have a line of a sneaker job in the hall every semester for signing up with laser cutters Because this is sort of one day that for me that this has become this sort of like oddly sinister fun social event always There's the faculty at the school that start with maybe a simple project or a collaboration in the shops that grows Into something bigger and broader in their own research and project and then there's the organizations that we partner with like biennials and museums nonprofits and fabricators that have so served a lot of Sort of mantle purposes for the shop is publicized in our work and your work as experts and knowledge to us and in some cases conduits for student employment after school It's like the thing where people go off and become lobbyists We have some people that are working as And then finally there's people like our guest speakers today Whose work really crops up the values not only of me things physical things and industrious work But his message is really essential to sustaining our shop I think that's why we I get to sort of take along with this every year And that's why I'm really thankful to be given a little part of this conversation because our shops would not be the same without talking to people like these So finally, there's just a couple of terms or words that have emerged repeatedly Either in conversation last night with the people or sort of my thoughts and cooperation for the new year with this event and That I think sort of bring our work together with the sort of work As it work here. So one of them is resourcefulness One of the most things illuminating things I've encountered in studying the practices of the city today Is how much they're informed by the context of the availability of materials Supply chains and stuff like that, but how congruent they are to the really highest Aspirations of people sort of working in this sort of computer inspired world here at GSAP as well And on the flip side how making things here at Columbia is always an act of industrialism and hustle despite the fact that we're in this city that Instinctively where everything is available you can find anything people find that does not exactly the case And it kind of goes along with the way we're getting into a prestigious institution like this where you like the second you get your foot in the door You're already competing for something else for a studio slot, for a laser pilot, for jobs, for this for that, for materials, for cramming things on the subway, or for UberXLs to get them back Everybody sort of carved out their own hustle of making things here And I think that really contributes to the sort of making culture in the school And the work that we see today as well It almost makes me glad that we don't have a store or we sell things in the shop. I mean, I'm glad about that for no reasons, but It really requires everybody to find not only new sources for things, but new things themselves and bring them into the shop But we have to deal with it at that point It's kind of an act of going out of your familiar space Both in metaphysical and literal terms It's key to being a successful maker here and I think we'll see that today as well So the second word is Collaboration, so when I was in school, I'll just say less than 10 years ago as you can guess We arrived, I arrived at school with this notion, this rumor of individualistic, like ruthlessly catholic place where students hide screens from each other And I satisfied each other's models where they're not looking I'm sure you've all heard the same rumors that I think are sort of urban legends at this point So I went in there ready to like say no, I'm gonna fight this culture, but when I got there, everybody was already away The sort of notion of sharing as a way of production was already full in swing And then I was actually the one that was a little like on edge when I was coming in And so everybody else had to sort of settle me down And then since then that conversations continued in architecture education as mandates to cross less courses, visual studies, building technology Or cross-disciplinize the work with your GSAP to render intrinsic Expertises in the field, in the city, that's a greater context of New York City And also the professional practice where we've been asking more seriously what constitutes Sort of a contribution to a work and how credit should be considered or reconsidered and Where a misunderstanding of this over the last century may amount to injustice that actually has to be rectified It's a parallel of those conversations, which we all know over the last ten years You know making always seems to be this necessarily collaborative act. You always need others to help teach To explain, to listen, to just hold things up for you while you plant something together To not return your emails about power coding something We've all been there. So many things are really out there in the physical world in a way that digital models are not And they just serve as connectors of people and ideas We see this in the speaker's individual work as well as in conversation That their work is singularly created as you'll see But the story they tell often reveals a whole network which interconnected people And then the last word that I want to talk about is the word risk And that's the literal risk of using fast sharp spinning metal on your software Which we cut with hands in the shops But also the risk of making a wrong movement into a piece of material that you've been working for four days straight And not ruining it and just the general risk of the uncertainty of outcomes that comes with working with materials and methods that are less Deterministic than say illustrator That's kind of unfair characters Characterization of illustrator So the the educator David Pie called this practice the workmanship of risk and you know I think the term is a little outdated and gendered But the substance of the idea is very true to the way that our students and the guests are working physically And they're doing much more to bridge the gaps between physical and digital than they are to draw boundaries between them So it's really this assumption and brace of risk and uncertainty that outcomes that is something that I think unites their work And it also goes a long way to describe the state of making a cheese out which I'm asked to do Okay, so I'm going to turn before our guests I'm going to introduce info maxi thought who's a continuing institution of peace up She's known around her first stewardship of the studio that's global workshop in Johannesburg up to about two years ago She currently lives in Johannesburg as a researcher with city Institute. She's an architecture degree Cape Town PhD for Berkeley She writes critiques Collaborates here it's produces exhibitions all over the world and today we have her here in the evening. So, oh, thank you And I also want to say a very What We were working on a conference at Columbia called and the desire is the African city, which is a collaboration As a set of imagination and trying to do it from Of crisis and lack that attach themselves to the sessions about African cities and so Africa is making So today And so the conversation is really part of the largest of the nations Might be formed by We've been interested in how art is racialized blackness Anyways, I don't think the two dominant tropes that attach themselves to African troops that And Instead Imagination and Today's panel discussion is Is another layer in this kind of radical reimagination of African and black space by engaging with people who are actively engaged with the work of making And it is a profound privilege for me to to have These four incredibly talented individuals come to join this conversation Because as South Africa, it becomes increasingly important to stress the Distracts So the first person that I'm going to introduce Who is the father of a studio industrial design practice located in the heart of New York, Nigeria The practice Very They work on rise of formal education as architects with informal training as free trainers. They're passionate about making things and work with different materials across disciplines and scales. Their relationship between local and local materials and their own craft culture informs how they make and design. It is truly direct involvement in the process of making, in the workshop that forms the core of the studio's practice. The ability to continually test ideas through prototyping and production underpins this methodology, and it has given populists a space to innovate and experiment, building an intimate knowledge of how things are made and how to build work in. Their commissions have been diverse and projects range from the design and construction of buildings to prototyping furniture and manufacturing small rooms that make up an ongoing collection of pieces including furniture for the April 2019 and Kia Orao collection. Thirdly, Temi Sam Jor is the founder of the Johannesburg-based Majesty Design Store. The studio focused on telling many South African stories using the medium-wide design. Temi says quite insistent that design becomes a medium for storytelling rather than simply being some of the producer's artifacts. She's also the curator of Sacrosan, the first collector of South African design at the Bound Design Group in 2018. And she was the oldest designer of the most beautiful objects in South Africa for her 222.0 paint with light in 2018 by Desire New Dalek. In 2017, she received a Future Founder Award from Desire Foundation and 100% Desire South Africa for the base product design and base to the emerging talent in 2016. So we're very happy to have you there. And finally, I have the pleasure of introducing D.K. or C.O.S. Saré, who is co-founder and principal of Architecture and Integrated Design Studio and World Design Office, LODO, which is based in Austin, Texas and also in Tamil Nadu. He currently owns a triple appointment at Penn State as an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Engineering and Design. He's also the Director of the Humanitarian Materials Lab and Associate Director of Penn State's Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering and Design of Africa. C.S. Saré is a tech global fellow, a full-brand scholar and African for tech digital champion. He's also the co-founder of the Design Agency from 2019 to 2011. And I've both launched my space platform and open source making technique here for Africa. So please join me in welcoming these four incredible individuals from West Africa. My name is C.S. Saré, I'm an industrial designer based in Lagos, Nigeria. I run an economist design studio for an engineering studio. I'm a designer for products and experiences. So, like I mentioned, we're based in Lagos. Commercial capital of Nigeria and Africa. Kind of an introversion. But we're also known for three things. Music, fashion and traffic. So, I'm going to walk you through some of the manufacturing models in Lagos. As a studio, what we tend to do is we actually have a barrier to make that space in our studio. But what we do is we design around manufacturing processes and local availability. I'm trying to create economically viable products and solutions and collaborating with artisans, such as welders, weavers, and then we also tend to find modern day manufacturing that's available around the city as well. So, this first image shows a place located just about another week in the studio called Cambridge Village. So, it's a manufacturing hub located under a bridge in Lagos State. At the age of 13, I was lucky and unlucky not to be sent here to actually have an apprenticeship for the summer. Yeah, first day, I think I cried about 10 years. It was worth it because it actually dictated a lot of what I'm sort of doing right now and what I'm curious about in Lagos. So, Cambridge Village is a very fascinating place because it's it's a mixture of welders, weavers from Ghana who have migrated from Ghana to Lagos to find work and also weavers from the eastern part of Nigeria and also the western part of Nigeria. Another place is Bariga and again at the age of 14 I had an internship here, apprenticeship here. I tend to visit quite a lot as well because Bariga is very interesting because a lot of manufacturers in Lagos get their wood from Bariga. But unfortunately for us, the wood actually comes from the eastern part of Nigeria and it's locked through water it's brought in through water it comes in as wet wood and it's really, really tough to get dry wood in Lagos. So I tend to avoid wood because I know I was speaking to Naeem as well saying, oh, how's the wood in Nairobi? It was like, terrible. So it's brought in through water and it takes ages to dry but it's still a fascinating place because local carpenters tend to spend a lot of time here fabricating, sourcing wood as well. That's me in my shorts as well. Just looking around and speaking to people and looking for availability as well and just to let you know that we've actually designed products around all these hogs and now I'll share them with you. So the last manufacturing hog is Ikeja I actually grew up here it's a very, very fascinating place it's a mixture of modern day technology and one of the biggest mobile phone markets is actually based in Ikeja called Computing Village here you can actually find local manufacturing and also modern day technology manufacturing. So I would speak for that as well once I start speaking on my product. Traffic. Lagos is known for its traffic as you can imagine human traffic as well. It's fascinating to watch a lot of creativity happens during traffic it happens during traffic and I'm going to share with you one of the products that we actually highlighted in the studio called Kuali and how this traffic has sort of brought to light creativity in Lagos So just to break here, just to say that when I was going to give this talk I had a few friends who are architects because I'm not an architect, I'm an industrial designer and I sat there and I said I'm going to talk to a school of architecture and they asked me, so what's it going to be called and I said it's Lagos and Designers Utopia and they're like, what? Like nothing works here we don't have to involve electricity the roads are terrible production doesn't happen here like everyone's going to China So I said, no actually I think the beauty of all of this happening is the fact that even the guys complaining to me is the fact that they've sort of embraced the constraints to try and create as much as possible and always at the same time really thinking about the ecosystem and how it works and how just one little product can affect the city and hopefully impact and improve manufacturing capabilities as well so innovation and travel this was done about two weeks ago at the studio we've had this curiosity and fascination with how people tend to make solutions out of nothing in Lagos and one of the products that we've highlighted is called Quali Quali is 100% recyclable it's recyclable as well it's made out of styrofoam cardboard and cellotape and it actually just cost 28 cents to make and the guys as you can see the guy down there actually sells it for a dollar, sometimes a dollar 38 it's a fascinating product and it actually shows the resourcefulness that happens in Lagos and how we have been inspired by the city to create to take the same approach it's very lightweight so that's Mohammed on the far left today he works I think he says he works the 12 hour shift a day to provide for his wife and it's extremely important to him to have this product to help enhance his business because he can actually stand it against the car or it has a stand just attached to the back of the product as well and during traffic he can just pick it up when there's like really slow traffic and he can walk around and people can wind down their glasses and say hey I want a biscuit, I want gong or another example of the Quali is sunglasses where the hawker is just basically walking around the streets and he basically says he sells out sunglasses every week which is incredible so utopia dystopia for me, I think designing in Lagos and designing around the hump is an extraordinary utopia what we are hopefully trying to do in the studio is not just being the ones to dictate the design that we create but actually collaborate with these hops and the manufacturers and local guys that have highlighted it so there's always this huge debate around the studio as well on what good and bad design is in Lagos contextually and figuring out why we have to make what we design in Lagos and if we are trying to do good design does it really have to sort of hit a few points here and there functionality, empathy, social connectivity does it really matter and this framework we created basically to help dictate and guide the type of design that we do the type of work that we put out and also making sure that we're considering not just the user but the product but the manufacturer even the distributors and also suppliers of raw materials for functionality of course the ease of use of the product is extremely important for empathy of course etymographic research we're really thinking about the cultural context of who you're really designing for as well for social connectivity I think one thing about designing for and trying to reach the rest of the world is that they want to understand why you're designing the product even though it's not a school they want to store behind it and we realize that sometimes we really have to tap into what they want to feel emotionally once we start designing the product so the first product I'll speak on is the L.M. School that we designed I think in 2015 it was designed it's an amazing product that really allowed us to start thinking about how to create in the studio and how to make and one fascination, one thing that happened was that we were designing a product for a client hoping to make it in Nigeria and he told us why can't we really make because it's impossible the production cost will kill us we'll have to do all this too so we lost that grief and I got so curious about why can't we just design products that are affordable that people can actually touch and feel and understand that we've designed this around we've basically designed something that's made locally internationally so in my research and in one of the books that I mentioned I stumbled onto a generator manufacturer that was manufacturing generator cases we've been running for about 5 years but they've just been making generator cases and products with products that had to do with electricity and a bit of generator as well so after I spoke to them I told them you guys have an amazing assembly line and it would be amazing if you would give us a few hours just to walk through and see what production capabilities you had and after walking through I realized that they were basically they had amazing equipment but weren't producing as much as they could have and just basically just weren't producing this one product so one afternoon I went into their just like Naim said yesterday I went into their factory and looked cardboard and I said hey I think I have an idea for a product I've gone through your production line and if you give me a couple of weeks we'll come up with a final product that's economically viable that's different from what you're actually producing right now and we're also diversifying and manufacturing so the first week what happened was I went in there didn't really know what we were going to do either furniture or electrical components etc it's had a conversation with them and realized that there was a niche actually for furniture and after sitting with them I said okay we're going to design people know people are familiar with metal and Nigerian generators and we already have that emotional connectivity but how can we design a product that people want to use want to touch or even want to collect so after that conversation I sat down I started sketching they then started talking to me about the constraints, the availability with the laser cutters and vending etc and I realized that of course communicating with them visually we had to do a 3D as well so I went in there with my cardboard and a standing knife and started cutting and sketching again and again and we finally came up with a form which is the MMS tool it was quite tough because of course they had never done anything like this before and they were still a bit hesitant saying I don't know how people are going to react to this and I think for the first two months it didn't even do too well from the students' perspective but afterwards we started getting international orders so we started creating economical viability for the company and through that we also developed other products apart from the school we just designed a band that we're going to pitch to Lagos States to see if they can put it in stock in Lagos States as well and we're also developing a band as well so that's the story we sat on and we just placed on it as well so ah yeah as you can tell already I'm an introvert but this was sort of an interesting product but at the same time one of the reasons why the design came up was I got approached by an architect to design a furniture for a space and I walked through the space, it was a co-working space and I walked through the space and realized that it wasn't functional for any introverts at all and I was mistaken in my head how am I going to work here this just doesn't seem right and after the long conversation he then sat me down and said okay you know what if you just design one piece for us that actually would be an introvert then we'll commission you so that was the introvert's chair and it got shown in the Venice architecture in 2016 because one of the period is one of the classmates so this is actually made under the bridge in Lagos it's designed around what's the weavers, the skill set of the weavers and the welders I'm happy to say that the guy who actually taught me how to weld them after that he was the one that welded it which is very cool so after a bunch of conversations with the clients doing research on what of course the issues with introverts working in co-working spaces you start orienting around creating some sort of and comfortable cocoon for people to work out of that would be like a similar structure that was also very portable that would also manipulate the space in the room as well but then also from a maker's point of view I think one of the main issues with craftsmen in Nigeria is that there's very high level of electricity and also and designing around what they can do is basically trying to figure out how you can create a physical object for them to understand your sort of design or final design adaptation that you're trying to do so when I do sketch I do sketch in the studio once in a while but I actually sit with the craftsmen and have a conversation as you can see here this is a 3D print that I did in Lagos and then we're discussing what type of welding should be done and they're also giving me advice on what sorts of materials should be used etc even with the chair speaking speaking with the so even with the chair working with the weavers they basically were telling me teaching me about weaving techniques educating me on some of the constraints that were happening also speaking on how to allow lights to pass through the chair as well because I also mentioned to remember about Kosovo because I'm also Kosovo so this is I think the last project that we did before I left for New York it's an installation designed for a designer based in New York but now he's moved to London he's called Kenneth he was an LVMH in New York so he had a show in Paris and he came up to me and said hi I need you to design an installation for me and I said okay cool and we sat down and realised there was a huge problem and he he told me what the problem was and he tried to tackle it not just for the installation but the product that actually made the installation so he told me so Niff the main issue and the reason why I actually approached you was because of a lume the lume that they actually made my clock with and so we sat down and had a conversation in the studio about the lume and he told me what the limitations were so one of the main issues with the lume for the readers was that it wasn't portable it also had a great impact on their body because even the sitting while using the lume was quite affecting their lower back because of the transportation they always had to order a taxi which also increased the cost for transportation as well so after he told me about we then basically we then decided to try to bring in some of these readers into the studio asked them to please leave a few of his pieces had a conversation with them started recording we had a few video recordings unfortunately I can't put them up just yet we had a few video recordings and they were actually watching what their techniques were looking at their sitting positions and their posture and then afterwards asking them what the main issues are after all of that we started designing around what the problems were having conversations with the readers and Kenneth as well whilst doing all of that not just sketching as well but not just me sketching but actually trying to force the readers and picking it up from there so the idea was basically to figure out how to improve the lume and basically produced we have improved the possibility of the lume by making it collapsible also creating a two level chair seating for the readers as well and it also has storage where they can actually store again thread before we leave it I have a few minutes let's ask Rush this is also a product that we designed as well called Table it was it's also made locally in Becos made out of reclaimed wood the top is actually plywood it's very sturdy because that's what we use in the studio and it was basically to design around the production that was happening in Beirut and figuring out how to use it because a lot of the carpet is actually embraced with reclaimed wood because it's a dry in comparison to local wood so designing around that and making sure that to consider the end user in the sense that how could we design a table for a modern day applicant who is basically moving from one place to another the tackle is meant to be crafting exchange it's how we use our workflow so this is a snapshot of our route to work in Nairobi it's totally chaotic it's a complete utter mess we really struggle with basic infrastructure around roads around water around electricity and similarly in our everyday working environment we have very little access to these specialists absence of building manuals building codes and even hardware stores yet out of this apparent lack people find an amazing resourcefulness and they become really ingenious in finding different ways to get things made using limited resources available that allows them to improvise around everyday building challenges in a very ingenious way so this is on one of our sites at the moment where these are reinforcement bars being bent and I think it's so peaceful watching the way this guy is bending his perfect circle it's incredible I set up my practice with my wife Beth about 15 years ago and these are the challenges we face everyday our challenge is how do we negotiate this gap as architects this gap of how between how we design something and how we get it built differently in a way that uses whatever levels of craftsmanship and materials that we have available and in doing so in a way that we can make a high quality product we had our training in Scotland but what we are struggling to do and trying to find is what and the question we are asking is what are our terms of engagement as architects in Africa what are those terms of engagement in a situation as ours we have found that a more traditional linear path of procurement and more distant production doesn't work well as designers we have to get really involved to be designers and work as designers alone is just not enough we have to get involved at every stage and we have to wear many hats and try and explore all aspects of how to make things these are some of the on all our building sites I think it's amazing how people make tools on building sites just spending stuff making stuff and find this everywhere from recycled bottle tin from old bottle tops or I love the hacksaw anyway we call it your this kind of culture it's all over the so called developing world you guys call it in South Africa you've got a term for it as well this ingenious kind of making of something with nothing this is our workshop our workshop has become an essential part of our studio but you know neither do my wife we've had an informal trend in different ways but you know it's certainly set up your own workshop making living doing it is a completely different story so we had to start with ourselves to complement our formal training we had to re-skill ourselves and actually craft what we designed today we use our workshop to do all sorts of things puppets for Broadway was a musical to Broadway last year architecture in joinery work this is our kind of store where we can collect all sorts of bits of wood designing and prototyping for Ikea there was a collection that's just launched using our workshop to make stuff make models working in different scales yeah this is a little scribble I made for my mother because she's always kind of confused by her son who's an architect shows up to pick up the children coming in sawdust now the second thing about learning new skills is whether it's including what we design or how we make something or how we collaborate with others is that we think through those skills the output of one project tends to generate useful input when applied to the next positive feedback loop and we call it crafting exchange where the cycle of what we learn in one project has a and how we apply it on the next has a direct way of improving how we run our practice and this is something I've seen that very much happens at Gisa in the make lab it's almost like you can temple the guild system and that's made me so happy to see that that exists here because so much emphasis is given on technology and having the latest robots but this is about people informing each other and real actual physical making that feeds off each other and there's no substitute for that an idea of exchange is central to what how we think and make things whether we're designing for ourselves or whether we're designing for someone else to make or whether we're designing to make something with someone else now all of these processes set up a very different condition of working I mean the greatest challenge for us when we stop being students and you know you set up your own business and you know we let our students really enjoy drawing and making not running a business and so what we struggle with today is is there a pointer here the group button side button is well you know there's oh thanks there's a scale here so I'm trying to keep it kind of in this zone here where you know for us designing is a very physical process and if we slide too far down the scale this way you know or you go the other way and you just become a factory worker just churning stuff out day after day and it's really keeping it in this zone where we're using the studio as a design space is what's super important for us so here's an example this is a most recent project we talked about yesterday it's designing a a jug right here and this was completely freestyle they have a co-working space and we're sitting on the computers we went into a meeting ready to speak you know and everyone's on the computer we put that all aside and we said ok right we'll walk here let's actually design this thing now in the room we've come all the way from Narobi to Sweden we're not going to go backwards and forwards let's just design it now and it's about what Jason was saying it's totally freestyle we didn't know what we were doing when we started we started modelling it you start modelling two spans yeah it's cool I like it, experimenting once bigger than the other, ok let's try and make the handle certainly you start making this handle during the meeting and then actually you know what the handle is a bit like a span and actually we can make a jug stack and that's quite a nice function of it and then you know the time and the way we added colour was then about you know using colour to denote function in contrast this was a year ago again with a similar kind of team all round we waited kind of this is really done design where we waited kind of we all got there exhausted all the way from Narobi we waited like you know it's huge like here it's got the same cube of a 3D printer and 24 hours later loads of stuff comes out it comes out and you can see you need the next iteration already and you know so Senek would call it an over-determination of error you know it's so well drawn and so it's just printed and it's unpredictable you can't do anything with it this then you know we could move on with it we'll extract the manufacturer and on we go here to scale up this is a current project that we're working on and so here the situation is how to then use our workshop at a different scale to communicate in a way that's not just drawings and models alone which architects do but we can push things further in a way that you know gives us a greater agency and you know okay I'll just play and then I'll describe what's going on here so what the situation is it's a kind of it's a building which is about that high off the ground because it's on a swamp and we've got this concrete detailed edge where we're worried that the contractor would not be able to kind of cast the perfect edge so instead of giving him a drawing which we can do give him the formwork we can actually perfectly cast the edge of the building and in doing so we kind of negotiate a condition with the contractor and bring a different form of value to our engagement with the contractor, the engineer and you know it's allowed us to kind of engage differently so what is the tool for mass production employing kind of local fabrication and techniques and results in a form of exchange that opens up a different way of working it's a project we worked on recently which is a new built cathedral where we made a lot of the furniture and all the pieces inside all the ceremonial pieces and it's been a super important project for us because it's really for us it's brought to the fore the challenges of trying to make really high-end products in a context formed with limitation so here are some of the pieces we made so these were kind of brass and rusty metal candlestones for all the ceremonial stuff I've never carved marble before the kinds of marble of course I can carve marble here all the time so just take a look how the water font was steel and marble that was really fun finding the marble, splitting it book matching it and then fitting all the glass in the building all the specialist glass all the glass was imported from this one manufacturer in America that manufactures this glass and so this glass artist was using it that the architect had forgotten that there was artwork going in the building and certainly we have to kind of resolve how it's all mounted and then the furniture these are some of the pieces and so I want to talk about the furniture to start with because these were really important and so starting firstly with ourselves how we designed for ourselves to make so the cathedral it's the most important piece of furniture in a cathedral that's where the word cathedral comes from the curved shape was informed by the building and it became the building became a starting point for a language that carried through all the other pieces but the challenge was how to bend this back in an elegant way you know this monitors that are not working this one again this is this idea of risk which I totally embrace don't don't expect that laser cutter to do it in the process of actually that laborious glass pouring layering all this to try and get this curved shape scraping it away it's still not to inform how this thing was going to emerge and then the skin of it being messy because it doesn't matter it's an experiment and what this process tells us is that when you embrace risk that outcome is a confidence that you can trust in the process of design and I think that is one of the greatest challenges we have as designers we lose confidence in our own gut instinct and skill as designers so that basically this evolution of this is part of the cathedral and we experiment with different shapes and forms to get joints and different scales and you know it's always when you're trying to resolve a chair you have to work it one to one joints don't go far enough and making both of those is really the only way to do it is if you want to start correcting mistakes in mass production and then you know this is kind of prototyping there's just a couple here it's so many prototypes in terms of how you clap the back because that was totally slowing down how we would make it so here is a little video of us resolving the back can you get some sound no can you see Beth Wayne I promise I do stuff as well well let's speak over it then this is Cyprus where it was grown at the site it's a huge problem getting any form of sustainable timber in a lot of our African context but this dates timber that's usually used for the construction industry and trying to make a really beautiful high end product out of it for us sets a benchmark for what could be achieved with the rest of the project and so what we had to do there actually and again this solutions to this situation where things are not available is you can't buy veneer so we had to make our own veneer we cut all this 1 millimetre veneer on the saw I don't recommend doing that I actually went from making 40 chairs to having a baby the next day so she was working by the end actually she didn't stop didn't even have a day off she's super strong I wish there was the music name next time so the other kind of interesting thing that emerged through this process was the building is very beautiful parabolic kind of curved arches and the contractor actually used a similar technique to make his formwork for building the building so there's this I think beautiful transposition of a building that's a piece of furniture that's tied to the architecture of the building and you know rather than just kind of aesthetically a beautiful kind of relationship between how they two are instructed and related this was not that many it was 40 two minutes left okay on we go chairs and then we had the pews the pews were informed to fit a thousand people in the building there's a prototyping process that was very much about the relationship between the sitter and vanilla and how to bring these two close together to allow to get more people into the building you know what we had to do anyway that thing was then critical thing was the design just to make eye among me that allowed this position to be brought closer together the critical thing in this was to come up with a design that was beginning for someone else to make you know come out of logical sections with shadow gaps offsets that allow something to go together in an accommodating way we had to be involved in every part of the process we had to get eye among me we had to draw stacking I had to explain to the guy to make the guy who made it had to stack everything and then we made a final version of the pews with the production kind of I suppose catalogs that we produced with all the jigs, the templates cutting lists eye among me and we made a prototype using that to make sure it all goes together properly this is the production of the pews and these are the pews in the final building so then the hardest part of this whole commission which was technically challenging was making the front doors of the building you know we had to be really involved in the whole process in these doors serve as giant display cases for these bronze panels the client commission there was an artist who had made them there was a band integrating these imperfect pieces into a much more precisely manufactured object there were lots of physical constraints too these doors weigh 700 kilos each and I was making them with a friend and my wife was at home you know without any mechanical lifting equipment these doors have to come apart go together very heavily on site each door had about 500 rolled intact bolts and then to be flawlessly made inside and outside going to go together vertically you need an excellent set of drawings to do that there were so many drawings but to actually make the drawings you're making it worth while they look in 2.8 millimetre steel versus 3.5 what's the weight difference when you do that how does the laser cutter affect how it welds together all these things are so important can you actually then what we wanted to do is can you make it without actually putting a grinder to the piece because we didn't want grinder marks on this kind of raw steel once we overcome our own kind of technical challenges in prototyping it you know there were other people involved from sourcing material to getting bronze sauce to getting all this stuff sourced and that's all kind of done locally around our workshop this is how the doors start to clamp together and use our woodworking skills to kind of square off and put things together making the eye laundry in bronze the door locks so this is the big challenge was the hinge you buy a hinge as an architect you specify a hinge and this hinge has to go into perfect opening it has to be adjustable these ones weren't we had to hack the hinge in Africa we call it tropicalization it's what we do to Japanese vehicles when they come they change the radiator you strip it off its electorate you put it jack it up you suit it up to make it suitable to work on the roads that's what we had to do to the hinge we had to hack it in a similar way so you know the contractor is just giving you an open hold on site everything is ready so you have to make jigs and templates that allow this hinge to also fit very precisely to do this so we made all these jigs to mount it to allow it all to fit and then weld it into site and then this is us hacking the hinge to then allow it to be adjustable so that's we fabricating it and then we had to go to the same level of care I'm nearly done to integrate the artwork so you have this process the artist is doing all the claims it's the lost wax technique and so many processes go to it from making the clay panels to plaster to then casting the bronze you had to be done in pieces and it's eventually goes together but the important thing in all this is the idea of tolerance as an architect we talk about tolerance which is about the fit how things fit into other things you don't want it to be too baggy, too tight but you know let me say when you have like the artist and the bronze guy they had no idea what we were talking about tolerance, they never had to fit into someone else's work it's not a convention that they are used to working within so we have to then use our workshop and rather than to change how they work we have to accommodate this imperfection in the way they work and templates they allow their work to fit into ours and these microinterventions that are preemptive measures that we can take as architect makers that safeguard the sanctity of the overall dimension and ensure that everything comes together and critically that for us tolerance is how we as designers absorb other people's design thinking into our own way of thinking rather than making new change, you don't have a measurement why should I be beating you with some precision it means nothing to you take what you're making absorb it into the way I'm working and find a convention that allows your work to fit into mine that's the big challenge now these are the doors coming together and the doors finished bolts drilled intact that was just one aspect of it but yeah they're really carefully flat no ground demands and yeah those are the doors so in conclusion one minute, sorry there's nothing new in what we do as designer makers and there's also no reason why in this world of digitization and specialization that this way of working needs to be lost in Kenya there's this economy that allows imperfect and the machine that the handcraft did to exist together which is a beautiful thing that still exists and you know in broadening our agenda and consciously overlapping our work with other people and other craftspeople we can bring a different form of value to the system as a whole collaboration is never easy but when it does work the lessons and rewards are unexpected and instructive time and again we discover there's a real craft in collaborating that creates a neutrality our challenge is to aggregate this way of working and continue to use our workshop to do so but in doing so try and build community around us who want to work in this way thanks so this installation was just one step in my direction so I graduated from film school I majored in production design and after working in the TV and film industry and state designer I decided to go back to school to study interior design because I wanted to create spaces and design objects that people in the real world could interact with my studio's philosophy is to celebrate and to share our heritage using design and that is how my first product came about it is inspired by the Shibetani which is a traditional form of dress that is worn by the Gondar women who live in the northernmost part of South Africa I made the light I named the light the Tutu 2.0 because Shibetani is the African Tutu last year the Tutu was named the most beautiful object in South Africa which is really cool another element of our heritage that I incorporated in my work is reading so the story of Zulu basket tree is really a story of revival the basket's kitchen here is on Zulu baskets from the Zulu baskets I made it from Lalla Palm which is a type of grass that grows in the province in South Africa and they are tightly woven because people use them as containers to hold the liquor when tin and trusted containers are easily available people obviously no longer would spend hours or even hours living in these baskets they would just go by a trusted container and so there was a serious decline in this local crop so people would go longer from here but in the 1960s it dropped in South Africa and people were facing starvation there was a Swedish missionary who was stationed in Bosnia and he noticed that the local crops were thriving people are facing little starvation and he started thinking of ways that he could help the people create the kind of opportunities for themselves and so he asked the women why don't you guys go back to reading these baskets I would then ask both the baskets to Europe that way you guys can generate income great idea the only challenge is that there were only four left so likely they agreed to train everyone else they started thinking of these baskets this ministry of the day they export them to Europe and that is how the economy of Zulu baskets started today Zulu baskets are among the most sought after connected items so the woman on the four left she is one of the three women she is still alive she is one of the three women who was involved in the thriving and the Zulu basket the woman on the right with the glasses that is Butin Mubbo Butin Mubbo was taught was one of the women who was taught by the racha to me today Butin Mubbo is one of the most renowned if not the most renowned is part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and also at the Smithsonian so this basket in the bottom here is at the Smithsonian the racha family no longer leaves because of her eyesight so the last thing she made was that basket at the top and that was sold into a private connection in 2014 so how I got to so how I got to Butin Mubbo we were commissioned by a French curator to design a bench for the Rebellation Spade so the Rebellation Spade happens every two years and it's basically a cat home for the best crafts in all of the world so I collaborated with another furniture brand called Heartlander and once they made this bench we are now desperately trying to find weavers to leave the back rest we called every single art centre every single foundation that the French Museums leave us and everyone said no no no it's not possible to take me to all of the world's ground forms the bench is always in the ground I'll show you again in a minute and just out of sheer like desperation and exasperation I just asked a friend of mine who happens to live in one zone where there's no hospital from if she knew anyone who could help us and she said to me yeah my grand can do it I'm like that's cute and she was like no seriously my grand can do it Google her Google her beauty in Mubbo a book has been written about her work and as I say it is so near and there will be an alien lander and so we took this bench down to her and she said to us no no no no no on the ground and we bailed and we bailed some more and just to get rid of us and she tried so yeah it was launched at the remunerations there in the Grand Palais in Paris and these are the two other women who helped her leave the bench which is incredible and that's sort of the best thing about working with beauty afterwards to say to us I wish you guys would come to me earlier and know I was younger because I'll have more time to expand on my technique and to build the connection because all of this time we always thought we could only be grounds and the Lullapong which is the grass that they used to weave they actually had dyeing themselves and just using like vegetation in the area which is incredible and then like as you guys mentioned like all of those colours that's all like from plants that you are looking at which is incredible so another element of our part of our heritage sorry that I use a lot in my work is beading and so last year I had the opportunity to collaborate with a program in the studio which is a beading studio that is based in Cape Town in South Africa so they are based in Rome for interpreting artists' work in beading so together we made a drinks cabinet and that motif that is on the front of the cabinet is actually hand beading which is the same it took the ladies 6 weeks to hand beading each panel and the picture on the right that was we made it to the cover of El Deco Italia which is a supplementary issue about the beading design and our installation was named the must-see installation which is really incredible so in closing I wanted to share a good story with you guys so a friend of mine was pursuing her master's at the University in Rome, Beaten and so she was just telling her professor about this role that we have and our role is to craft and establish a South African design and category program so she wanted to get his insight because Italy has basically done the same in beading Italy in Rome and her professor says to her oh no, that's not possible because Africans don't have heritage oh he said I'm sorry and so that's fine I know however, that's his opinion and he's entitled to his opinion and that's fine however, using design we will continue to share our craft and our heritage with the world and most importantly to use that heritage to create economic opportunity for all of our people for all of the people of Africa thank you hello, so my name is DK let's say I'm sorry are you guys alright? it's a lot of content it's really incredible, I have to say for those two organizers I find it really phenomenal to come to Columbia and see this work and have this conversation I feel very at home and I think in some way it makes this harder and easier for me I think a lot of these themes are very consistent with the earlier talks so maybe I will gloss over them a bit quicker a bit more quickly so, yeah so I have a design studio called Lo Design Office Lodo we've taken to call on ourselves Transatlantic because for the past 10-15 years we've been working out of Tema, Zagana and Austin, Texas and we're very interested in Lonus which I won't fully explain but I'll touch on it in some of the week ways and I'm going to show a cross-section of work that is a little bit less well, it's not a really conventional architecture for saying and I show this because this is sort of a diagram of our normal architectural process which is a design and delivery process a bit conventional also in many cases very linear even though it's iterative because you have to get approvals from the client things have to be issued once you start, you have a work instead of drawings you have change orders you have to track the construction process, etc and in some ways it forces you ways of working and also the challenges of running a business also certain kind of conventions just in order to survive at the same time a lot of the places that we're working in are really about intervention in a site and particularly in super low spaces places where nobody has any kind of money to pay for architects or pay for design services we're thinking about designing a space like that which is so other to what is taught typically in the academy and what you find is that it's actually the opposite of linear everything is simultaneous so you see the arrows sort of are kind of going both ways and this also came to this diagram you're designing and you're researching and you're making at the same time but oftentimes we're doing things really just to generate the resource and have an intervention in space and a lot of the work I'll show today is work that is done with no budget at all or $20 or $500 which is very different from some of the other things I'll show you so very quickly just to give you a sense of the office because we work at very large scale very small scale so last time I was at Columbia and I think you guys have like a water studios project or something like that and it was just present some of the urban work in that context so I'm going to really rehash it other than to say this is a project called Columbia City for a new development outside of you see a current time when I sort of just cancer on the surface of the earth and this is for a new development for about 150,000 people outside of the city right opposite where the international airport is being moved for this is a project which is sort of multi-billion dollar project and it's now kind of an illegal situation where the land alone is valued at at least $200 million in a country where many people don't really even see money on a day-to-day basis so the opposite mechanics of what it means to design a project like that and that's a project which was based off of Anom City which is an open source sort of urban design project which we did over a number of years in eastern Nigeria Anom is a kind of community of peoples that live along the Izizi River out of the Niger Delta and that's a project which informed a lot of the work that we continue to do in that it grew out of a multi-year participatory design process with the community using sort of geo-referenced mapping of the site to map historical spaces sacred spaces where the spirits are where the different sort of trees were planted by whomever's grandparents and understand the sort of cultural dimension of the landscape to inform the urban design this is the Izizi River and I sort of show this partly because what you find often times when you're working in these spaces is that if you want something to exist within the project you have to make it and so in a space like this where we were building a new sort of greenfield development on the kind of community of land where we put everything from scratch including the brick factories where we use this sort of relationship between excavating soil from the earth using that for fish farming and aquaculture training people in brick production but also all forms of construction and finding ways to link every sort of intervention that begins to see the project to see the city as a way of building skills and interlinking and sort of essentially revenue flow from one site of activity to another activity as a way of helping to generate income for people as part of this community and one thing which I see later is that as we were doing this oftentimes having to work with very good resources we found ourselves increasingly drawing on bamboo here this is atos at the base of the project which is a kind of spirit forest of the bamboo gods for providers so as a way of introduction I'm going to give you kind of an origin story and I guess in some ways we're going to zoom back out of the work a little bit and then try to zoom back in so ten years ago we were at this sort of manifesto called after centricity how to use existing systems to improve livelihoods this is something we've been reflecting on more because we're now sort of in a phase of building out sort of writing a new manifesto which is the city of Temma which is also where I live you can see it here and part of my way of introduction Akra and Temma are often talked about separately but when you live there you realize that they really are twin cities you can see them right next to each other Temma is directly on the Granite Meridian and together Akra and Temma are the centers of the world in that they're the urban exploration that's closest to the origin of the earth which is what we're going to do with it so the yellow is the electricity created across West Africa the blue is the watershed that feeds into the hydroelectric power supply of Ghana red is the transportation routes out of Temma and the port but what you'll see is that like many other countries in West Africa Ghana still very much exports raw materials gold, aluminum, bauxite, diamonds, manganese timber, now uranium agricultural products, cocoa is a huge sort of cash crop and it imports everything else that's been manufactured and that extends very much to the production of architecture which is something we've tried to challenge here you see sort of proximity of Akra and Temma and what's significant about Temma is that Temma is a new, talented line designed for the scratch to be an industrial city so you see on the left housing and on the right-hand side factors and I sort of started by several years of research into this space which tried to understand from a very large scale of planning for the entire development of the country of Ghana to understanding what that city was like in the day-to-day as we live there now so one thing about Temma is that it's part of this global project of building new towns which Michelle produced at the New Town Institute in Rotterdam has discussed was very much part of Cold War policy to design and build cities that were either capitalist or sort of according to the logic of the city out of the Soviet Union and Temma is a city which is really no different and so they built the city they built power supply factories and then this port in order to extract raw materials and to import finished goods but when you move around the city you'll find that there's a lot of transgression and there's a lot of spaces where people have actually in a way found their own way to hack the city and in particular what I found extremely interesting is something which I began to call kiosk culture and that is how you find this very small scale of commercial activity all the way from peddlers to move around carrying things and selling things these pop-up shops by the side of the street and understanding how people create a space to make and sell things within the city when they have very little resources and understanding how that begins to inform sort of the architecture of the city and that again includes for example people building a bar in the front of the front yard of their house in a city which is designed strictly according to the logic of functional zoning and the bar is supposed to be in a commercial zone area not in the front yard or a sort of bar to shop hair salon next to your apartments with a kind of carpentry workbench next door because you need to have a place to generate income and you can't just live in your house all across the city these kiosks that are essentially the shops where you buy everything colonizing the sidewalks and you also find a lot of innovation like this is a barbershop on the left which also repairs and sells computers and you find this other shops that sell everything from phone credits and sort of phone cards to any kind of goods and for me what's very interesting is that when you practice architecture you find that these are also the workshops where all the metalworking happens where the carpentry happens and they're all over literally every neighborhood of the city and used to literally build the building blocks they used for the architecture and so when I looked at the city I found that the narrative behind the design of the city was that you're going to have this huge industrial city that brings all this innovation but really it was at the grassroots at the sort of low level of the city where you found that people were improvising figuring things out very quickly which also is very much like the Duocali reality that you find in East Africa so as a way of summarizing this and entering into some of the work I'll just sort of at least you can read it right but it says that the manifold of Temla's participation and the figuration of international development policy the historical best practices of the town and country planning located in some way sourced from the west encodes a geopolitical mandate of policy formation and demands a centralized administrative apparatus charged with managing its development so in other words building Temla was an effort to extend Western capitalism into Africa anchored in the central node of industrialization for national development but since then citizens of the city challenged the authority of its centralized planning framework by transgressing its master plan destabilizing the system of urban plans core and revealing alternative models of resistance or retrofit that can reform efforts to map African urbanization with contemporary modes of living and city-making to better integrate customary logics and interclass forms of agency so one of the ideas here was a project called BAMBOT where we built dozens of these over the last few years but when we mapped this is a sort of long story short this is a map of the relative construction cost versus what we call the micro territory or effective micro territory how much space you got in the building which again it makes sense that it's sort of exponentially more expensive to build larger project larger sized micro architecture and so this was looking at how if you can use things like bamboo or found recovered materials can you shift shift this matrix to actually build larger spaces for less and free up money that you can use largely to connect to the digital economy so these were some of the kind of conceptual projects that we started with and building on this idea of bamboo life cycling so growing the bamboo which is a weed in Ghana so it just grows on its own and people try to get rid of it and using that to enable you to self-build temporary architecture which at its end of life can be recycled as charcoal as a fuel source and combat deforestation so we built lots of these little projects everywhere from planting bamboo forest different pieces of bamboo to lots of different small scale infrastructures you saw earlier on a project we did with students from Stanford looking at how do you actually bring the solar panels into these spaces this was a kiosk museum that we did in collaboration with the artist curator Nana Foyeta Ayim which is actually kind of mobile pop-up kiosk museum that moves around Ghana as a way of bringing art and culture to communities that are not necessarily going to go to the museum or a bamboo dumpster where what happens when you start developing a project with hundreds of people on a construction site in the middle of the forest and no trash cans and people still are buying things that are coming in a plastic bag and suddenly you're polluting the environment you build your own bamboo dumpsters and we found that this is a way of actually onboarding carpenters when people show up and they say I'm a carpenter or I build out of bamboo you'd say okay build one of these dumpsters like this young man who after sort of part of his apprenticeship got to work with one of the masters masters in a way and always we had to start with a physical model it was the only way to make these things comprehensible and then these two guys built these structures usually for a couple hundred dollars in a few days to a week and here's one we were sort of experimenting with vaulted structures I think this one took about four or five days and then we covered it with like an old billboard from the sign so then we looked at sort of smaller scale and again lots of sort of experiments just trying to understand the material and understand how can we connect these things how can we move towards architecture which can become closer to no cost or extremely low cost or here was a pavilion where again when you're working at sort of zero cost budgets we did this for the launch of gallery 1957 which is like an art museum in Accra and we had no time to design it we basically just went and built it so we just got a bunch of bamboo and then we spent sort of a day assembling this thing as a kind of building performance for lots of experiments with sort of young people around what we call bamboo robots where working between sort of digital modeling even sort of teaching our sketch up physical models trying to understand sort of geometric possibilities and then again people without any formal training making or design whatsoever these are computer science and engineering students that sort of just made this was actually the thing where they wanted to go to have some privacy when they talked on their phones or sort of this is for the child watches street arts festival we did a number of installations where we actually camped out in a kind of public square for a week and built a bunch of stuff out of bamboo with the youth where they then staged this kind of art performances as a sort of stage and sort of learning about bamboo or prototyping in the forest and then coming into the town figuring out sort of different ways that you can create sort of super fast light cheap construction or these sort of experiments where we built a sort of mobile van bot where we actually used it as a sort of playground where kids sort of jumped up and down on it for a weekend and we figured out sort of where the joints failed and what was strong and where it was more vulnerable and hopefully sort of this work has culminated in our proposal for MOMA PS1 which I just de-installed like two days ago and that was sort of this idea a colony of sort of van bots that could invade the PS1 courtyard and kind of create a space of sort of engaging in the public I think I'm largely out of time but maybe just I will really quickly just try and link this to one of the later projects that we've been doing you may be familiar with it, it's called the Agoboloshi Makerspace Platform and this was really a sort of intentional project to try and build Ghana's maker community you guys are also familiar with the sort of world of fab labs but this started with a meeting of a bunch of people that were involved in the maker community in Ghana and we said how do we scale this up, how do we build this and sort of out of that people said well let's start with Agoboloshi which is sort of this blight on the sort of image of Ghana which is this scrap yard in the center of the city you get these kind of images of young men burning copper wire cables to recover copper super polluted there's a lot of environmental destruction happening there here you see it there's this sort of slum old phenomena, the background is the central business district in the foreground the middle ground is a river but it's dry seasonish so it's sort of plastic and this is what you find in this place in all kinds of materials but despite the sort of narratives the sort of total chaos is actually very organized you have these young guys burning wires and cables in order to recover materials but we wanted to engage this space so we started with a sort of road map and planning out the project we actually took spending a year doing that and developing this entire sort of theory or change model of how do we conduct the intervention and then we sort of went into the exploration phase which is sort of going onto the ground and sort of discovering what it's really like with the people from that community so this is the recycling that happens in the city of Accra even though technically it's banned by the city because young men go around and collect scrap and they bring it back to Abiboshi where everything is disassembled and all of the raw materials are sorted by type you have small workshops that repair computers, electronics and resell them so there's a lot of ingenuity and a lot of hacking in these bases but also a lot of recycling industries that are actually happening so people that are recycling plastic and selling it back to factories and then also all the reuse of sort of scrap materials to make a lot of household products and products for commercial cooking and also the construction industry and then we also have our fair share of these massive machines from pre-World War that are still making things happen but you also have things like this where you have people that build welding machines out of the scrap and these are actually the majority of the welding machines that you see people using around the city so we sort of went through this whole place over another year with young people understanding the needs of people in this community and sort of mapping that into a physical spatial map of the entire ecosystem understanding what was happening where as well as doing an archaeology of the present understanding where some of the pollution is happening so that in the future when the whole global community has to try to clean up the site we can know how to do that as well as understanding the entire kind of value chain of the scrap industry from global to local and then back to global again and then sort of out of that we then went into sort of multi-year process of co-design which really started with taking the scrap yard as a laboratory and getting together young people from this sort of informal context as well as students and recent graduates in the steam fields so science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics to go into the scrap yard and mine it for materials and parts and components and use that to make all kinds of different types of interventions some of them more architectural others more machinery to try and clean up the process of the scrap industry to reduce pollution and slowly this also began to kind of emerge on a larger project which is this deployable makerspace that we've been developing since that we call spacecraft which I'll just try and show quickly before I wrap up but yeah also they built this drone which here you can see it flying for the first time you can see the body was really high tech some old plastic bottles and again part of this is about just bringing people together it was about 2000 young people that worked together half of them from the informal sector and half of them from steam fields from Ghana Togo Senegal as well as internationally from Europe and the United States so this project will be called spacecraft so there's a sort of physical deployable makerspace there's a set of toolkits which people can customize based on what they want to make and then there's an app which is a digital platform for the next makers to find what it is they need to make what it is they want to make so of course it took us another year to develop the app went through a whole co-design process with people working in this community starting with manuals around e-ways so they could understand what the hazardous materials were but also understanding people's aspirations of their lives and developing stories that can sort of segue into the actual performance of the app which was sort of coded and built in a crop for Android and then here you see user testing back in the scrapyard in our makerspace I wish I could do this more quickly but I'm trying to be clever and so it's on auto sync but let me just try and take you alright I'll just sort of show the sequence and then maybe one last installation in the car so really in a way the important thing here was going back to this idea of kiosk culture understanding this type distributed site of manufacturing capability all across the city as well as across the country this is a project that went back to that to say is there a way that we can create an approach to building the components of architecture that can be done in a semi-standardized way to allow you to build a more robust building with higher degrees of accuracy and precision so using just the same tools that people have in their roadside shops we developed the jigs and all the templates that people had fixtures to build these equipment within one millimeter precision where you can then assemble the structure with a few people that don't necessarily have any special skills in a couple of hours as well as similar processes to develop some of the toolboxes and the other components and I'm going to be just close with here's the sort of toolboxes they stacked great furniture and the current development of this project is so it's a modular system so you have these sort of trusses that bolt together and it has short sections of metal so you can use offcuts from the building industry and then you use bolts from old automobiles and we're also now developing the CNC bots so that people can gather together robots there's sort of internal water filtration and hydroponics for cleaning water and air and so this is some of the the current phase of this development again in this case it's sort of a makerspace inverted where it's a microbuilding that's like a toolbox where you can check tools out and then they can be distributed around the city and this past year we did a technology transfer of the project to Dakar in Senegal and it was a very good test for our current project of building this sort of visual graphic manual how to make this because the team that came from Ghana to Senegal could not speak French and the guys making it in Senegal could not speak English or a tree or airway or any of the languages so there was a total language barrier but they were able to sort of figure it out and now this is a kind of pop-up fava which moves around Dakar and introduces people sort of in the street to sort of digital fabrication and it recently went to Mauritania and now I think it's maybe back in Senegal anyways I can stop there we've done a few more installations in a way the way we're trying to look at trying to build sort of small scale small scale incremental sort of modular tool set that people can make in their own communities at very low cost in an incremental kind of way so that as you accumulate resource you can expand capabilities and capacity and size and work together with other makers in the ecosystem as a community so thank you very much and one of the things I really stuck out for you was this idea of kind of distributing the influence of production that characterised so many of the politics in which you produce where the modernist idea was sort of kind of centralised administrative apparatus for producing the world's environment so that it could explore across multiple sides whether one is talking about Johannesburg or Leibos or Proctena so that was something that was really very interesting and it speaks to in my view a particular kind of post-colonial geography where infrastructures of extraction have kind of flayed to a certain extent produced this highly fragmented landscape that nevertheless creates openings and opportunities for innovation and creativity so the idea of transgression is fascinating but not simply transgression as a refusal of auto-colonising technologies but more as an opportunity to think grandly about the present and the future and then also a very very important intervention both by Nifemi and Tabisa about the idea of heritage culture and memory and how this is so deeply embedded in the way that one produces the work and also highlighted by both UK and my aim is the idea of collaboration and risk and being able to design across multiple registers that can accommodate and absorb different kinds of capacities and skills so I don't have any questions but what I would like to do is to invite questions from the room or I said on engagements I don't know if you'd like to respond to each other's work as well but I don't know if you'd like to respond to if there's anything you'd like to respond to on your presentations or if there is a problem like that maybe you might be excited Well I'm totally fascinated what he goes up to here because I can see it's been super relevant in like say Nairobi for example and across and it's had to make something like that and share what you're doing across the continent as well would be amazing because this is the contemporary toolbox that we need in all of our contexts to make contemporary products and Nairobi has stepped into this in its own way embracing the whole tech industry and yeah I just think it's super relevant I think to answer that as well it's fascinating because technologies are the forefront of a lot of research and innovation that's going on in Africa for our neighbors and it's fascinating because what you're doing seems like it's open source and there's very limited open source in Africa so I just want to find out if there's a way that we think that information can travel faster across the continent in comparison to just creating physical installations the short answer is that we're trying to do this thing it's at a point I guess this is for the digital world so we're trying to be faster it's a strange thing because like I said we've had to actually push back some of the people that were super interested in the project because all money has strings attached and when we're trying to do something which challenges certain kind of global dynamics it's really weird when you have to battle all of these forces because everything is tied to resource but it's complicated so in a way we sort of reverted to bootstrapping it but we're getting very close I think within the next year the sort of upgraded application management should go online which is purely graphic and then we'll start to add videos so we've had a ton of interest from lots of different countries in Africa we've presented it a number of times and everyone's like we want to do it but we don't have the capacity to like interface with that so we're hoping that this can help in some ways but we're also about to launch the sort of facility in the middle of this kind of ecosystem of makers where people will be making this spacecraft themselves on the land at which point these are fully released into the system My question to you is how do you negotiate like local council because and not make illegal structures then you know it's difficult I mean it is I guess so for example the makerspace that we have that's in the scrap yard we have an MOU with the government and we're making it on the land in order to be there but that's only because we have like students from universities internationally showing up there and we didn't have that no one else there as an MOU with the government but I think the other hack has been it's about in a way putting the process first so in a way as long as we are building a bunch of these things ourselves and owning them we're focused on building the open source sort of blueprints and their own spaces and environments in which case it's not about us it's about the people that have their own globalized negotiations I think we're putting attention and it's a question for Trani which has to do with your statement about South Africa as it wanted to establish South Africa as a design category and I mean we talk about scrap yards and hubs as these infrastructures and spaces for making the culture but there's also interstitial questions about how one goes about creating a design category and I'm wondering how you're negotiating these other kinds of infrastructures that are about you know Milan and this and to your American institutions and what kind of maneuvering one has to engage with in order to craft a space for itself maybe some of the money with the local council other problems like that I think it was really interesting to hear in your presentation the case that a lot of what you're working on there were already that kind of conversation happening in South Africa and actually the South African government has built many past spaces in all of this and a resource to communicate but no one uses them because no one knows how to use them which is very interesting for us we have a lot of corporate corporate corporate companies that are invested in helping establish slightly designed the category and so they invest a lot of money to help us do all of this work to help with all of this and the donations helping also like creating opportunities for all of the designers and makers to collaborate and another interesting thing that happened alone is that we don't have a huge manufacturing manufacturing industry but we have shop fitted and so the shop fitted have become from China manufacturers which is really interesting so it's a we're learning, we're all collaborating, we're all learning from each other and we're thinking and trying to gain this combination so I'd like to open after the discussion on the floor if anybody wants to ask about how this is going to work My question is about collaboration What do you mean by collaboration and what I guess will also be the meaning for this we use the example of technology where the inside collaboration can be sort of can you name me a very good question I was just talking about how in tech collaboration can be so the scale can be at such a different kind of thing to companies as far as collaboration to be able to collaborate in a different part of the world in terms of structurally describing designers in terms of what kind of collaboration should have what are the laws of giving to us so a lot of the designers collaborate and that's because we're all a different label so some of the the most established designers already have their own workshops and for others who don't have their own workshops but maybe have the concept of the idea of the product so what happens is that the guys who don't have the workshop who have the concept who never work with the guys who do have their workshops and then they're doing it so once the product has been made we're then really the craftspeople to apply their craft whether it's weaving or welding to do the piece for the next label and when we're working with shop leaders for example there has to be it's a very tricky relationship when your shop leaders help you develop a new product they also feel the same of ownership of the product and then they want to go and start making the product for other designers because they're already doing the same manufacturing so that having that conversation and having negotiations in that space is very tricky but it has to be like a trust relationship I have to trust that with the help of the middle of this product you're not going to be established to and so it's tricky maybe we can take two questions and obviously so we'll take three questions maybe this is a question for I mean first just thinking about like you're talking about the fluidity and the design I think that's something that we all have the inspiration to pursue but these bureaucratic structures and the separation of architect and fabricator or architect and contractor even from a legal standpoint we start to threaten that so a lot of architects of course there are ways around that design but a lot of architects I think are nervous to step into the developers so the question I think for you would be if you find that in Nairobi those bureaucratic structures are starting to creep into the way that you're working or they haven't done yet and that is despite all the issues we face it's a huge freedom you know that's really in the west crippling any innovation in the world of design recent performance which are all very relevant issues but also things like Reddit is such a kind of constraint on the freedom that you have as a designer in how you specify and yeah I don't know this is something we are going to have to deal with we're just in the process of moving and setting up a new workshop in Britain probably one of the most bureaucratic I'm not going to be allowed to make a window I need to sit test we're going to find out and yet I think we have to work out ways to break this down and it's still a great freedom we have it's a big issue do you guys see any way around it in the way that division between architect and maker well I kind of see it in the whole pipeline thing that you know that it's maybe a new form of a guilt system that is maybe potentially eroding the yeah I think there are certain architects specifically that are trying to get around that depending on if you do a contractor like shop architects will then for large scale stuff to be subcontracted by a contractor who has been hired to work on the project that they designed as architects so they have to form a separate company to then be subcontracted out by a contractor so they're kind of wearing two hats at once but they're able to do it because they're very large corporations if they were smaller they might not have the resources to be able to set up an additional company and have all the legal staff that would be required to form a straight app in this particular company Can I say that's why you are just discounting the design of the model because we're small in the US but we're licensed as architects and as general contractors so I think it's a totally valid model and I'm a little bit maybe you can talk to an actor I'm curious why you're suggesting it's not my really I think oftentimes architects don't want to do it and it's arrogance because it's sort of like they're an architect and let the contractors do what they do and so there's a sort of distance but I don't know if you want to say that that is I was going to say that's my authority I was going to say that's my authority unfortunately we have such limited time that I really want to make sure that we get as much feedback as possible but you don't even like alright my opinion was I thought of this when people were talking about how we had to build factories to build whatever and just kind of the narratives of what's available and the narratives of lack and the problem of all of these I was interested in how you think your projects or your work do you ever kind of categorize on these factories that were there or small factories or categorize on those operations that are present and maybe kind of give them space and work to grow versus kind of daggers the back where there's actually not intelligence and lack of supply and you have to do anything to start that's the tension I feel a lot and that's the idea that there's no one who can do something and it's just we have to do it and you also have the small operation that there's a question there so let's take one more question and then we'll maybe answer I know I'm going to I know that this is probably and then perhaps the other things through collaboration and taking people about the money and the notion that lack is I'm hearing that there's a way of bridging that through collaboration where resources and knowledge is sort of seen after where people who have those resources and knowledge in order to collaborate with other schools so I think that's a super interesting issue I think we need to work out how to do it across our own continent because in Ghana the same issues we have in Nairobi but they're not Western issues how to deal with that how people come together and I don't know how that platform an extension of DK's app is something that connects us all this maker, this hand African maker space idea or makers all over it in whatever form we all have so much to learn from each other because seeing everyone's presentations that could be played out in any African city the DNA there are some DNA bits rather than in all these cities similar with the issues I'm sorry just to say something on my answer to this question I think for us what we try to do is we make sure that when we create a product it's economically viable not just for the studio but for the ecosystems considering the manufacturers and every single stakeholder and when we design as well we design in the mindset of if we're going to batch produce or mass produce it's important to us because we don't just want to create a product that seems to be art and we're not going to touch it or use it or sit on it etc but it's important that we put it out there so that we create those viable systems I'm sitting in my shoe tent let me make one on the panel for your work and it's really insightful that I somehow run into this today that's not part of somewhere else coming here I just have to be here that's not part and so I think it's really amazing the work that you're doing I love this thing, you know we put this in Africa I love to worry about all so far all it's cover up because this is that but there's so much, if you design as utopia you go off the continent to be able to produce there and I commend you for what you're doing everything right I would like you to touch on the funding so how do you fund your work is it privately funded is it government funded yes we need to do a lot more there but there's still being a foreign and some of you naturally go out there to say or come out from somewhere else to work in a community that you might not know that well and it's so fragmented right so how do you do the funding also for scaling scaling your businesses and how do you want to do that what do you need to do more personally my studio is self funded I worked for a very long time saved up I basically put everything up to like start the studio funding for me has been tough but I really don't understand how it works in Africa I mean I do a lot of grants and missions and organizations etc but it seems to always have to go through some sort of European or American organization to get to Africa so it's tough and of course we have I mean I'm going to try to be politically correct I'm not using like I tried to be able but we have a few issues with I mean of course government and corruption so and it's tough because they don't see design as something that can actually create some insurance or actually policy which we are looking to dive into in the studio because we believe that even just introducing a design policy in a place like that proud labels or even in Nairobi can actually help infrastructure wise when it comes to mass production and goods when it comes to actually solving health care issues it's extremely extremely important another thing is I think for me I started up with furniture for the studio because it was affordable I've I've done product design for health care I've done product design for mobile phone and smartphone companies but of course setting up my own smartphone company is cost wise et cetera so I started up with furniture just as a state to figure out a way to carry out research on the manufacturing process is actually available and educating these manufacturers on how to explore the processes available without changing assembly way so that's our work is funded by what we make very simple there is no other research I mean I think we try say architect your work if you are working as the designer as a whole and then you can take away components that you are making there's an efficiency there for the client and for yourself because what you're drawing is what you're going to make on the outset is what you draw you can make it and you're cutting out that party who needs to redraw it so you're doing the work of several people but the challenge there is costing correctly so that you benefit from that efficiency that's really difficult yeah so like me and you our work is also funded by the work itself is our products it's our furniture and lighting products so that's the one way we scale our business some more and we're backing the Government that's a policy that encourages companies to procure from local designers and they get takes breaks so that's one way policy framework in the case to help propel so that we define a working they don't worry what is they don't worry in the end we have to negotiate quite a bit but the framework is made you've been waiting a long time to ask if that's true it's been great happy to listen so I should start by coming at you but I don't know that much about this is the economic between some of the various so I apologize that I have this track for anything but it seems to me that what is common across the presentation is about creativity and the development of the original process in response to constraint and to an absence of resources whether economic or infrastructure and I'll just share with you in the presence of past economic development or the smoothing and provisioning of more infrastructure how do you then negotiate with the fact that these niches and these spaces that are now present might disappear but for example with Zoom architecture do you then support these improved infrastructure because that might lead to easier way to produce your goods or do you find that might actually constrain the profits that you are developing today? I think we're such small businesses that we can't control this process but you know it's so apparent how the growth of you know in Kenya that Chinese infrastructure has really taken over and correlated with the extraction of resources and it's you know in even the 15 years that I've been working there you know there is no more wood in Kenya there isn't there are off guts that we cut 10 years ago is better than what is better than anything we can buy today and it's so real that kind of that one way kind of what's happening with our resources and I don't know how you fight that and how you fight the flight of cheap UPDC windows in the market and I don't know other than you keep producing your stuff locally and building an economy around making them locally because if we don't as designers do that, that industry dies and we've got to fight for it for me I think one thing that I'm also looking to investigate is to figure out how to use old age technology to solve modern day problems so figuring out how to pair those two so that crafts doesn't die in Africa but what are the sorts of solutions that we can come up with educating these craftspeople on modern day issues that are sort of around this and designing around that as well and the context is our responsibility to specify it's our choice to clients often don't know they won't know he's something else we have the power to direct things slightly Do you guys start to know how the product is usually the thing that funds the business and you also mentioned the first stool that you had when you first put it out it kind of was slow to start selling for all of you what is your strategy when you make a product and there's no in media or before how do you get people interested in the product one it wasn't like a commission which you just made it out of interesting what I learned from that stool was to actually listen to the market and when you're designing around what's available as well you have to sort of map out the ecosystem and figure out what people want and what people want to do so one of the most successful products that I showed was the table was actually the collapsible table and that's successful because we actually sat down and had conversations with potential users figuring out exactly what they want and what they needs our aspirations and designing around that and carrying them along the design process so figuring all of that out I realized that you could actually you could approach it in both ways so the stool when it's like we're approaching a factory creating economic viability for them and then they just finding out where we can actually push this stool or you go out to get your hands dirty speak to a bunch of people who you potentially think might want to use the product and figure out what the issues are and what problems you need to solve every time I think it's designers you know we're always such martyrs we work so hard for nothing but we don't work for free I mean basically yeah but we're not artists we even find it and we need to push for a good free because otherwise you go around in circles overproducing and in availing the world you know and that's the big challenge don't work for free in the world you know yeah very rarely do we kind of like when we started out we would be doing that a lot but I don't have the desire to make a chair for the sake of making certain chairs in the world so any very good chairs that can be made way cheaper in Germany than I can make why in the design can we chair or what is there a good reason do we need it is there a reason it can't be imported do I still have to make that chair do you want to add there's a lot of development that's happening in South Africa so what we do is we target interior design and we take finance life we get a say in what their style is and then we create a type of real rendering then we sell them the rendering and if they love it they'll give us funding we need the name this is a good note to your time again thank you so much to Josh, to Nina to GSAP for collaborating on this event and hosting all of us so graciously over the last few days and also again a very heartfelt thank you to DK, to me, to me to my team, to Tabisa for making a little way to New York in order to be part of this conversation which I hope is only the first time during the meeting as we build our pan-ethic design platform that has many other applications so thank you to everybody and just have a good day