Daniel Charny

Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden

In this episode, we’re talking to Daniel Charny, a creative director, curator and educator with an inquiring mind and an entrepreneurial streak. Alongside Dee Halligan, he is co-founder and director of Forth, a creative studio, where he works with clients from Google to the Design Museum. Describing themselves as ‘part R&D Lab and part consultancy, small, connected and serious about finding better responses to our changing world,’ their most recent initiative is a large scale European research project exploring the potential of ‘Open Schooling’ to enrich childrens' creative engagement with science curriculum. Daniel is perhaps best known as the curator of the influential exhibition Power of Making at the V&A, which drove him to establish the award-winning learning programme Fixperts, now taught in universities and schools worldwide. Other projects include the Aram Gallery, the British Council’s Maker Library Network, the open-source exhibition Future of Fixing and the Design Museum’s permanent exhibition Designer Maker User. And, as if that wasn’t enough to keep him busy, Daniel is also Professor of Design at Kingston University and guest lecturer on the Master in Design for Emergent Futures at IAAC, Barcelona. He lives and works in London.

We discuss:

- The mindset around fixing and the impact it has.

- The importance of ‘applied creativity’ in education.

- Why young and older makers need to come together to create change.

- The differences between formal, informal and non-formal education and why all three are important.

- His time spent working with Zeev Aram and The Aram Gallery

- Fixperts, an award-winning learning programme for applied creativity and social sustainability.

… and more!

Here are some highlights.

The connection between making and mending

“I think they are completely connected, but there are different values sometimes behind them and different reasons for doing them. Menders have material intelligence, they have acquired skills. Making is, I think, completely integral to mending. I don't think it works the other way around. I think a lot of makers can mend, but it's not necessarily their driver. There are lots of tribes of makers, and some of them are interested in innovation. And so improving is more of their state of making. And yes, they are mending something, but not in order to mend it back to what it was. We then just think about it as a kind of access of care, and you think about conservation, you think about maintenance, you think about care in daily life and repair, and then hacking and then adapting and so on.”

Waking people up to remember that we have making

“It was kind of like, ‘Okay, let's open that cupboard and remember we have it.’ We don't have to invent it, it's there, we just kind of forgot about it. Too many people forget about it. And Fixperts, Maker Library Network, they really are taking that notion with a social agenda together. So there was an area in ‘The Power of Making’ that was very much about communities making together, so it wasn't so much DIY culture, it was ‘MIY’ culture, and it was very much the early 3D printers. […] Or materials like Sugru are about fixing but also inventing and maybe doing repair for someone else, and there was this whole notion of the social of communities doing things for themselves and for others.”

The importance of engaging with young people to create change

“When you think about the challenges we're facing with the environment, it's not just about coming up with how to clean in the ocean or how to reduce carbon footprints, you need a major cultural shift to support young people to even learn to think like that. We have to engage much earlier with younger people at the stage when they are thinking about what their values are, how they understand themselves and creativity. It becomes a different kind of premise for me than teaching design. It's not just the sense and the mindset, it's actually enabling. The idea is not enough, they also have to have the skills. It's the imagination and the skills together in order to achieve these shifts.”

The book Katie mentions towards the end of the episode, from which she has taken the term ‘stubborn optimism’ is The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, which you can buy here. (This is an affiliate link and both Katie and a bricks and mortar bookshop will get a small cut if you purchase this way.)

Connect with Daniel Charny here.

Follow Daniel on Twitter here.

This episode is dedicated to Zeev Aram: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/03/22/zeev-aram-obituary/

About Katie Treggiden

Katie Treggiden is a purpose-driven journalist, author, podcaster and keynote speaker championing a circular approach to design – because Planet Earth needs better stories. With 20 years' experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, Crafts Magazine, Design Milk and Monocle24. Following research during her recent Masters at the University of Oxford, she is currently exploring the question ‘can craft save the world?’ through an emerging body of work that includes her fifth book, Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020), and this podcast.

You can find Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1, sign up for her e-newsletter here and if you’re a designer-maker interested in becoming more sustainable, sign up for her free Facebook Group here. If you’d like to support more fantastic content like this, you can buy Katie a ‘virtual coffee’ here in exchange for behind-the-scenes content and a shout-out in Season Three.