Today the MEND*RS blog tour is stopping off at Stitched Up HQ.
Months on and we’re still feeling the warm happy glow we experienced at the amazing and exhilarating MEND*RS Research Symposium in June. We were there as Menders in Residence, hosting a stitch clinic, but luckily we were also able to take in all the brilliant talks and discussions from a wide range of tinkerers, thinkers and makers. One of which included our very own Sara Han presenting her research on upcycling textiles on a large scale.
See the full programme here.
It was great to meet such a vibrant community of ‘menders’ – one that we never knew existed but that we felt at home in right away. We left MEND*RS feeling part of a movement – and all fired up about its future.
The best thing for us as an organisation was that we discovered a whole host of new and better ways to describe the things that we already do.
Some key points for us which arose from the event are:
- That our society needs to be more materialistic – not less. We need to have more respect and value for the things we own.
- Things need tending and mending as much as they need creating.
- That once you’ve mended something once, you build a connection with it and thus are more likely to keep on mending it.
We loved the way James described the ideas behind the service provided by Access Space; giving people what would typically be considered a ‘perfect’ user experience is actually less good, because when something just works, you aren’t required to understand how it works, and therefore are unable to fix it when it breaks.
Find out more about the fantastic Access Space project here.
We also found some very useful food for thought in Jade from Antiform/ReMade in Leeds’ research on the reasons people get rid of their clothes, which recorded the faults with clothing left behind after a clothes swap.
And there was plenty more inspiring brain fodder too – far too much to mention here! Suffice to say the experience will stay with us for a long time, and the mending community will go from strength to strength. It certainly feels like it’s gaining momentum!
So what’s next for us? We’re very excited to be soon opening a ‘shop’ in Manchester which marks the beginning of a six-month project which will, of course, involve mending services and workshops plus lots of swapping and upcycling fun! Very exciting! Join our mailing list to keep up to date with the latest.
And make sure you check out the rest of the MEND*RS blog tour while you’re at it.
Happy mending all!
1 comment
What a lovely article!
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