THE MAKER & THE SYSTEM  

systems thinking in community
british council
chengdu, china
july 2019

artists: 
sophie huckfield
kit braybrooke

published in:
this is distributed design, 2021
making as national transformation?, 2018

in this community workshopping model crafted by studio we&us for engaging with difficult topics through material participation, sophie & kit brought together a focus group of chinese craftspeople, makers and artisans in the city of chengdu (which was about to instill its own compulsory recycyling laws for the first time). together, we explored their relationships to the circular economy - a vision of economic development where things are designed, made, used and reused within planetary boundaries (ellen macarthur foundation 2018) - and how this impacted their practice across the scales of policy, industry and community. 

participants first examined where the materials that they used every day came from, and how these were associated with the circular economy as an intricate system of use, reuse and recycling - as well as government policies to encourage mass innovation and entrepreunership. each person was invited to engage in the emergent (and at the same time, ancestral) system of a circular economy in china in an embodied way, by taking on the role of an entity within the chinese system of industrial production such as transport, design and/or manufacture. speaking from the perspectives of these roles, participants imagined together what a completely sustainable system might look, feel and sound like.

these experiments built a new model for a collaborative, hands-on environment for all to explore complicated concepts and systems thinking, with participants thoughtfully reflecting on their own perceptions of what it means to be ‘circular’ through material participation.