This home is a factory: Implications of the Maker movement on urban environments

Mark Richardson, Susie Elliott, Brad Haylock
2013 craft + design enquiry  
This paper traces a practice-led enquiry into the question of how jewellery -as a practice and an artefact -can engage the city in terms of emergence. While jewellery is often understood to have a decorative, symbolic or communicative function, this research explores jewellery's immersion in and emergence from the urban context. Coming from a background in architecture, I am interested in approaching the city as an extended site for jewellery: both the lived situation within which jewellery is
more » ... orn, and a rich material resource for its production; and, where jewellery is sited between mobile bodies and these urban surroundings. This practice-led research adopts the analogy of the saprophyte -an organism that decomposes organic matter and recirculates nutrients through its ecosystem -as a logic for exploring how making and wearing can feed off and back into the material ecology of the city. This paper shares four projects that respond to specific urban situations -Melbourne, Ramallah (Palestine), Chinatown (Melbourne), and Christchurchdiscussing what emerges within each situation, and what these projects offer for thinking about jewellery -as a practice and an artefact -and its relations with the city.
doi:10.22459/cde.05.2013.09 fatcat:k7xabqdwozdr7hxyo4353xrdtm