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BUT WE ARE NOT STRANGERS, ARE WE?

I was on the bus and heard a conversation between a Mum and her 4 year old son. She spent a long time telling him that he wasn’t to talk to strangers. To this he replied “but we are not strangers, are we?” This reminded me of this TED talk about the importance of talking to the people who surround us.

https://www.ted.com/talks/kio_stark_why_you_should_talk_to_strangers

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Thinking local in Bristol - photo credit to my dad.

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CONCLUSIONS?

To conclude this body of work I want to make a look that encapsulates all of my research and opinions on the subjects I have looked at in the start of this blog. I want to make sure I make my project a celebration of trades and traditions and to recognise the sheer brilliance in the people who keep these things alive in today’s society.

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‘MODERN’ PROBLEMS.

This project links to my previous project that looked at the way we use mobile phones. I wanted to make something that meant people had to put their phones away and not depend on them to find their way. This pushed me into researching alternative and traditional ways of finding your way like star maps. In the same way I used traditional means to solve a modern ‘problem’ in this project I want to look at this in the same way. First looking at a broad range of different research resources and then focusing and thinking about problem solving.

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REFLECTION.

From everything I have researched so far I know I want to keep my research broad however making sure I also pin point what links to my concept and keeping it within reason. I need to keep the idea of talking to your neighbours at the forefront. I feel that I have a lot of different research areas including social housing, market towns, and honeybees. I am sure that this will keep my project energetic and exciting.

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DOES WORK CREATE THE COMMUNITY?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08gxndc#play

Would it be better if robots did our jobs? I recently listened to a really interesting radio program on radio 4 that explored the idea of robots taking over our jobs. Whilst listening to this I was particularly interested in the idea brought up of working creates a community, so therefore if robots took over in the future would we have a community at all? What I took from the program is that work is not just a ways to make money but also a way to stay connected with others and help your community move forward. Therefore if robots were to take over jobs in the future surely we would not have ways of staying connected, because work provides us with so much of the drive to connect. So surely bringing trades back into our society would start to bring us back together?

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balfron tower

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SIDE BY SIDE

My starting point for this project is the fact that people don't talk to there neighbors any more, I believe that this started when we started to build up rather then side by side. After the war the move towards social housing began, Britain had to build new housing and fast. This started the craze to build up and up, rather than people living in houses side by side. These great builds were supposedly built around the idea of community, creating miniature communities within the cement walls. However I don't think they suit the way in which we create bonds with people, piling people on top of each other means one thing to me, fitting more people in to a smaller place.

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BEES

Honey bees have a great way of organizing the hive that includes a great sense of community. Each bee has its job that makes up the hive, I look at this in a sense of making the place you live better for yourself and the others around you. In a hive the worker bees are mostly female, there job in the hive is to clean the hive, it is only in the last part of the worker bees life that she becomes a forager. The male bees are called drones, they have the least to do in the hive, to me the hive looks very similar to a 'nuclear' family. The secret workers of the hive are female.  

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RAG AND BONE.

Traditional crafts are dying out, due to lack of interest and different needs of people in the 21st century. Jeremy Atkinson is the last traditional clog maker in Britain, making beautiful traditionally made clogs that can be specially designed to your foot. Such craftsmanship is something that is made to last and last. Fast fashion is something that totally neglects this, continuously making to be a slave to trends. If fashion were to start to be made to last rather than to be worn for one season, what would happen?

 In the Victorian times the rag and bone man would come once a week to collect anything that wasn’t of need to people and he would take these to be recycled into other industries so that everything was used to its full potential. Much similar to the make do and mend tag line during the Second World War.  These ideas have been tried and tested much like those of clogs. They were crafts and ideas tested over many many years so there must be something to learn from them.  In my project I want to look at what we can learn from the past, and if these ideals can even be part of the 21st century.

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advert from the start of infinity bakery. 

picture from http://infinityfoodsretail.coop/about-us/our-story/

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BAKER’S DAUGHTER.

As a baker’s daughter and a baker, I find village or community bakery’s very humbling. The bakery used to be an essential part of peoples lives, and bakers were highly celebrated for there trade.  Which is something that people don’t need to appreciate today due to the fast pace consumerist world we live in today. Bread has become something that can be picked up from the supermarket for such a little price because of the production scale of the operation. When I go to work in the bakery I know that every loaf is made with love and a pride for what we do. I feel that this is a re-occurring theme in today’s society; we are losing the pride in traditional trades and replacing the love for these things with fast moving easier alternatives. I think if people were to slow down and reconnect with traditional British trades, shopping local and only taking what we need the community we live in today could reconnect and find a happy medium.

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London booth maps.

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COMMUNITY.

In my final major project I want to look at the idea of a community, how one is built to how it falls apart. Looking at how communities have changed over the years and how our communities today are  rapidly changing. I want to open a discussion as to how things are changing and is this for the better or if should we stop and look to the past for help. To do so I want to look at traditional trades, social housing and the internet to try and understand what has created the shift in peoples perception towards there neighbors and the people that surround there everyday. I have always found the way people come together interesting to form groups and what unites them so I want to try and look at this through lots of different points of view throughout the project.