TOAST Renewal: a panel discussion

Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden

Do we always need to mend? How can mending help to nudge us towards significant behaviour shifts? What are the materials innovations that might help? Are there self-healing materials – or even self-destructing materials?

In this bonus episode, I’m leading a panel discussion with TOAST, including amazing insights from Seetal Solanki, Tom van Deijnen, Celia Pym and Bonnie Kemske.

We discuss:

- The art of kintsugi and what it means within Japanese culture.

- The fine line between repairing invented holes and using repair techniques as embellishment.

- The stories and conversations held within the damage and the process of repairing.

- How a lot of the world’s fashion waste comes from fast fashion and why this is so problematic.

- Who gets to decide when something is ‘broken’ and what that means.

… and more!

Here are some highlights.

How stories come through during the act of mending something

“What I discovered very quickly was that if you ask someone, ‘do you have a hole in your clothing?’ you very swiftly discover an awful lot about a person that you weren't expecting to learn. You learn who their relative is, how the thing got damaged, you learn about maybe someone who's important to them who's died. And I thought, I'm onto something here, 'cause I'm fundamentally quite a nosy person. I'm always, if I'm on a bus, the person who wants to talk to my neighbor. I was very excited and moved to discover that clothing and this invitation to repair clothing would invite all this conversation.” - Celia Pym

Why the cycle of fast fashion is so problematic

“There are so many reasons, and I think a lot of it really comes down to the fact that we don't really care or respect these textiles, the clothing that they become and how they actually adorn our bodies. Because we haven't really formed a relationship to those pieces of clothing in a way where we build a relationship towards care and respect. We actually don't know where they have been derived from because the supply chain of a lot of the textiles being made for clothing is really convoluted and complicated, and deceitful. So it's really quite challenging to understand where things are being made, how they are being made, and where they end up even. We're so disconnected and so far removed from what things are made of, simply.” - Seetal Solanki

Things aren’t meant to last forever

“Not all materials will have a long life span, and I think that really stems down to the fact that there are materials that are meant to naturally bio degrade. And that's actually okay. And we need to be more accepting of the fact that things die. Everything has a birth, a life, a death and a re-birth, and that exists within the material world, human world, animal world, and plant world. We are so fixated on the fact that everything has to be long living, and I think there's a sense of renewal that needs to be understood a bit more, and that really comes down to the natural cycles of materials as well, that we need to kind of address rather than forcing our material to do something that maybe it's not meant to be doing.” - Seetal Solanki

Connect with the panelists:

Celia Pym

Bonnie Kemske

Tom van Deijnen

Seetal Solanki

The books we mentioned:

Why Material Matter – Seetal Solanki

Kintsugi: The Poetic Mend – Bonnie Kemske

Wasted: When Trash become Treasure – Katie Treggiden

Homemade Europe – Vladimir Arkhipov (sorry we could only find the follow-up to Homemade, the book Celia mentioned, and only on Amazon!)

About Katie Treggiden

Katie Treggiden is a purpose-driven journalist, author, podcaster and keynote speaker championing a circular approach to design – because Planet Earth needs better stories. With 20 years' experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, Crafts Magazine, Design Milk and Monocle24. Following research during her recent Masters at the University of Oxford, she is currently exploring the question ‘can craft save the world?’ through an emerging body of work that includes her fifth book, Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020), and this podcast.

You can find Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1, sign up for her e-newsletter here and if you’re a designer-maker interested in becoming more sustainable, sign up for her free Facebook Group here. If you’d like to support more fantastic content like this, you can buy Katie a ‘virtual coffee’ here in exchange for behind the scenes content and a shout-out in Season Three.