Factory town fish7/25/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Over the four months they spent on the project, all of them learned something about team-working, financial organisation (the trip was mostly self-funded, with bus trips and accommodation subsidised by the Cultural Council of East Iceland), the challenges of professional film-making (invaluable at a time when designers are increasingly being asked to work in many different media), self-publishing and event-organising. The students did this brilliantly, at an impressively professional live presentation that outshone anything I had previously seen them accomplish in college. In a village where design is valued mainly for its application in, say, post-volcano reconstruction, people need to be convinced of the relevance of the communication designer before any collaboration can even begin. ![]() As a result, designers here tend to assume a higher level of understanding about their practice than actually exists. London is one of the most design-conscious cities in the world. But we would also have to go out there to do a recce, and find out what local people wanted from them. We suggested they record the process through visual diaries that could also be used to promote the project. With help from two tutors (film-maker Victoria Salmon and me) they formed groups to work on different elements: a website, press releases, a conference presentation, a documentary film and a publication. There were about 60 students on the course, from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, and about a third of them volunteered to get involved with the Fish Factory project in their spare time. Unlike the usual visiting speaker’s ‘look what I’ve done’, this was a blank canvas inviting us to ask: ‘How could we help? How can we participate?’ (Not, ‘How did you do it? How could we do it?’) Here was potential for a live project with an international design context, reaching well beyond our London base. The first phase would be launched in 2011 and completion would not be until 2016. ‘So we were really excited to get involved in a project that could put that idea into practice.’Ī key to our involvement was that the project was just being hatched. ‘We talk about it all the time how, as designers, we are capable of more than just making things look nice,’ said one, Cally Gatehouse. The students on the MA Communication Design course I teach at csm immediately wanted to find some way to collaborate. Mupimup! is mainly concerned with sustainable design – recycling textiles and reducing industrial waste – but what struck our students was their description of an ambitious new project: to transform one of the country’s many abandoned fish factories into a thriving creative centre, which could function both as a retreat for visiting designers and artists and as a renewed hub of life for Stöðvarfjörður, a remote village with a rapidly shrinking population. When I invited Rósa Valtingojer and Zdenek Patak from the Icelandic studio Mupimup! – Recycled by Design to come to Central Saint Martins as guest lecturers during our Green Week in February 2011, I little expected that six months later seventeen of us would be heading across Iceland in a bus laden with cameras, notebooks and some heavy-duty av equipment. ![]()
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