作为设计师,我们更应该鼓励对话 交流而不是单方面的独白, we as designers should stimulate much more of a dialogue than a monologue with what we do. 为明天的设计播下种⼦子, planting design seeds for tomorrow.
There is a young design/craft generation filled with quality, skills and dreams grafting into a world full of information, needs and languages. These young creative practices can inspire a future and a bridge where they can make a difference when they hold the right tools at hand.
The bridge between The Netherlands and China has been there for generations, creatives and industry travel in between and the conversations transform into a collaboration, a shift currently noticeable in the process of ‘Made in’ and ‘Created by’ changing into a more open-knowledge trust ‘Cradle’ network building together on a different context. You start wondering if the metaphor bridge is still the right when we are defining new approaches. How can we question the work cross cultural design when we not look at the daily flow over this bridge. Time to analyse whether the meaning of ‘Cradle’ opens a new definition for the future bridge for a new design generation.
This is one of the many questions and processes that studio BoomWehmeyer has been exploring in their design programs in China and the Netherlands. The dialogue that they have held in the last 7 years has been around learning to craft and design with the information, context and roots in making and thinking. Studio BoomWehmeyer is a design studio working with design education and has been very engaged by product and urban work in China and previously hosted their studio from Shanghai. The start of many projects are grounded in BoomWehmeyer’s belief and commitment to embed education as core ingredient in the realisation of the emerging design practice.
So how can the young generation of designer-makers transform this dialogue by taking „Made and Created “ into „Cradle practices“ ? What seeds to we need to plant into a creative landscape for cross-cultural designer-makers learning to slow grow and position their definition of local and context before deciding what stream of products they create into the world ? What could we imagine being design products of new ways of working ? As product makers we can say we set out for a new pulse by design, one that connects touch with meaning, mentality with mindfulness and an extraordinary with everyone. To work and connect the crafts with our human needs.
In China more and more young designers and makers are working with the international knowledge and local craftsmanship. Their access into a world of information and thinking is nearly similar to what the young designers in the Netherlands can access, but both with different roots and imagination and one that still touches questions that are comparable. During a series of interviews in Jingdezhen BoomWehmeyer connected up with young Chinese students at the Education centre of the Pottery Workshop. The Pottery Workshop, an institute in Jingdezhen builds also on learning their upcoming Chinese creative generation about the wide field of arts/crafts within one material, ceramics. They focus on learning by doing from the first steps of clay into a world of international perspectives. BoomWehmeyer found out that in reality both Chinese and Dutch students are focussing on similar questions: “How do I build up my practice, what are my customers or income, how can I reach into different work fields and what can design/crafts mean for the future?” In the one-year program “Made.Create.Cradle” that is currently being activated by BoomWehmeyer these questions are the main topic to bridge young Chinese and Dutch designer-makers in a process around the meaning of co-design, collaboration and design consciousness between the Netherlands and China.
The Cradle project developed from a small start workshop in Jingdezhen into an engaging program to grow new designer-maker futures for graduates and young professionals in China and the Netherlands. The project is a hands-on learning/research program, combining different facets, developing through different phases and partners in China and the Netherlands. A small Chinese/Dutch team is working from Arnhem (NL) as well in China where workshops and set of relations are being activated in this program.
The program runs being a “resource by experience” to give young starting creatives tools to build local authentic creative businesses and starting to define their value from a knowledge, skill, sensorially and emotional point of view to defining creative bridges.
Moving from making and being a creator – into a place that nourishes (cradles) and builds new futures through designer-maker practices.