Royaldesigners

The session took place over a long weekend at Dartington Hall, Devon with 8 RDIs, 42 early career engineers, designers and scientists, and 10 wildcards.

The reconfiguring of Make Do & Mend (the WW2 campaign to conserve resources) to Mend Do & Make set the tone. It was an opportunity to interrupt our default ways of thinking; for an industrial, or environmental, or textile, or systems designer to find common ground with a sustainability, or structural, or tissue, or aerospace engineer. Not forgetting a porcelain artist, a human performance specialist, and an engineer-writer-designer-clown who entertained us after the Saturday night banquet with a cabaret of songs that juxtaposed the fantasticality of surrealism with the banality of reality.

The Mend Do & Make theme in a global context would have been overwhelming, but we could interpret it any way we wanted. Faced with so many issues that need mending (from wars, to climate crisis, to an ailing NHS) we were given the time, space and interaction with others to think through micro strategies that could be extrapolated to solve macro problems.

Dartington Hall is a cinematic location. A pastoral community rooted in the 14th century, it’s a time-capsule of additions and restorations and much mending, doing and making has been done over the years. The Dartington Estate has a history of progressive thinking, so there was an inkling that the walls were saturated in speculation and experimentation, and for a moment in time we were osmosing into it.

The informal breakfasts, lunches and coffee breaks joined us in instinctive combinations that developed into conversations. And the formal seating at suppers in the Great Hall prompted sustained discussions exploring not only each other’s career histories but also our families, relationships, origins and cultures.

Long before we all arrived, participants were invited to bring an object that needed mending or symbolised dysfunction, so we were all primed to mend and make good. As we placed our objects on the Great Table in the Great Hall everybody circulated with an intense curiosity. Objects included, a chewed pipe, a disentangled sock, smashed crockery, a frayed wallet, a disabled parking badge, a snapped gold ring, and Thomas the Tank Engine.

On that first pass I was filled with questions. Who chose this object? Why did they choose it? Was the mending existential or practical? As people explained, we were transported into their lives and began to see through their eyes. Some objects had fallen apart through use. Some had been damaged through circumstances. Some had failed through poor design and manufacture. But all had been selected because they represented deeply emotional connections.

My object was a handful of Lego. All things (including us) are subject to entropy, which is why we need to repair them, or inject with energy to sustain them. Making something with Lego begins with a state of chaos and we order it into expressions of our imagination. We randomly choose a Lego brick that might have potential, click it to another, and another, then refine, then destroy. Likewise writing and editing is all about mending, doing and making. We decide what we want to say, select the words, place them next to other words, then polish and perfect to form a communication which is frequently misunderstood.

Our activities took place all over the grounds, but we were constantly drawn back to the Great Hall housing the Great Table hewn from massive oak planks. And it struck me how the things we make are not just conceptual and constructional, but interactional and transactional and generate legacies we need to be aware of. The Great Table and its ring of chairs was a physical enabler that drew us together in the dramatic architecture of the Great Hall like a theatre set in which we were the players. Most of us lead frantic lives in cities chasing work, dealing with clients, carving out careers and immersed in technology. To come to a place like this with a monastic quality transformed our mindsets from speeding up to slowing down.

Throughout the weekend we were jumbled into loose associations and presented with rhetorical reflections that had no proscribed outcomes, so everyone was feeling their way into each other. Our negotiations around developing ideas inspired us to dig deep into why we behave in the ways we do. We talked about how to steer people away from the dopamine of consumption. How interventions to make something better can have unintended consequences. How nothing stands alone because everything is relative to other things. And how breaking the way we habitually solve problems supercharges our ability to mend, do and make.

Some of the challenges impelled us to explore the rolling acres of the Dartington Estate without a clue where we were going physically or intellectually. We discovered natural amphitheaters, gazebos, henges of tree stumps, jungles of giant rhubarb leaves, and an archway of branches we decided was a portal to a parallel universe, inspiring us to think that perhaps anything might be possible.

Back in the Great Hall some performances started out trying to be logical and rational but became increasingly shambolic and collapsed into laughter. We had all become less controlled, less self-conscious, and were enjoying our vulnerabilities. One group created a community dance in which everyone joined hands and ran through human arches in a parody of perpetual motion.

On the last morning, we gathered on the Great Lawn and played a game where everyone had to triangulate themselves with two other people. When one person moved even a few steps, it sparked a ripple-effect through the crowd so 70 people had to shift their position. It emphasised that seemingly insurmountable obstacles can be affected by incremental tweaks that trigger chain-reactions of change.

For the final session we sat around the edges of the Great Hall in a spontaneous and lingering silence. This exhausted but euphoric congregation had the rarified ambience of a Quaker meeting. Some stood and spoke, and we witnessed their words. Our reflections on the collaborations that could emerge from our new friendships were punctuated by the haunting hoot of the steam train that runs along the River Dart Valley, reminding us that there was a great big world out there waiting for us to dive back in again.

Tom Lynham helps organisations to communicate better, and attended the RDI Summer Session 2024 as a wildcard.