Arvind Gupta – a scientist, day-dreamer, inventor and toymaker who lives and works in India – taught participants how to make toys and create experiments from household materials that are usually thrown away. Gupta has made more than 700 improvised toys, travelled to more than 3,000 schools and has written 15 books. His website ‘Toys from Trash’ has received more than 41 million views with 20,000 digital books downloaded each day. This workshop inspired big and little kids alike and reminded us all that it is possible to create something fun and fascinating from simple materials.
You can buy thousands of units of something from somewhere in the world. This is necessary to an extent for today’s populations. But still, we are anxious. Who made those thousand units? Did we really need to order that many? And what do these things even mean to us when we don’t really know anything about them? Fix and Make is a series of workshops and talks that explores these anxieties. Through the practical, the experimental and the philosophical the program brought different people together to actively questions our relationship with and consumption of objects. Fix and Make invited individuals to reconnect with their hands. It encouraged new learning through doing. Through the process of fixing and making we reckon we can gain a better understanding of how things work and apply this knowledge to other areas of life: to solve our own problems; to take control of our own resources; to break our dependence on manufacturers who create products with built-in obsolescence. The annual program,running throughout 2016, brought together more than 60 collaborators to lead workshops and contribute to discussions from fields as diverse as neuroscience, art, design and craft, food, education, music, psychology and the environment.
Make Do: Utility Wear
22.10.17
Workshop
Making as Meditation: Patterns from Plants
17.06.17
Workshop
Make Do: Jugaad
11.06.17
Workshop
Make a Swarm Trap
27.08.16
Workshop
Repair Remake Swap
09.07.16
Workshop
Make a Utility Apron
11.06.16
Workshop
Ghost Net Weaving
01.05.16
Workshop
Invent an Instrument
30.04.16
Workshop
How to Make Toys from Trash
20.04.16
Film
The Art of Kintsugi
09.04.16
Workshop
Oyster Appreciation
02.04.16
Workshop
Knife Making and Preservation
12.03.16
Workshop
Meet the Toymaker
27.02.16
Workshop
Toys from Trash
27.02.16
Workshop
How to Make Camp Furniture with Dale Hardiman
19.02.16
Film
For the Love of Things
10.02.16
Talk
Making as Meditation: Chopsticks
23.01.16
Workshop
Making as Meditation: Chopsticks
16.01.16
Workshop
Make Your Own Camp Furniture
05.12.15
Workshop
19 Objects: New Ways to Value
25.11.15
Talk
Ownership of Things
18.11.15
Talk
Make a Swarm Trap
15.11.15
Workshop
Reshaping Glass
14.11.15
Workshop