Design Shame

Shame yourself to be a maker!

The consequence of being a creative and unstoppable maker: too many things, climate change and world pollution. It is difficult, not to take responsibility for this - as a designer of interactive products and garments. More than responsibility - SHAME! Shame on you! Stop! Flyskam -> Make-shame. Shame is a powerful social "self conscious" emotion which destroys energy and joy. Shame makes us wanting to disappear. Shame isolates the individual inside a prison of feelings of total incompetence. How to get out?

Overcoming Shame with Archeology

Shame can be overcome by making your worries public, talking about it. The lifting of shame feelings creates an enormous energy and creativity. Inspired by the fact that humankind could easily be forced back to the Stone Age, inventive palaeolithic techniques and materials, being sustainable and biodegradable by nature, are studied, experimenting with wood, flint, wool, hand spinning. The body of knowledge and skills of prehistoric mankind studied by archeology is vast. Prehistoric humankind gathered materials from the environment, made the required tools and textiles in a skilful way. The inventiveness and usefulness of these early “product designers" is stunning. They could make "out of nothing". They could find applications for everything they found. What they later discarded was at the same time per definition immediately biodegradable. Searching a way out of make-shame, techniques of another period of human development became came to the rescue.

The great escape, from shame to E-textile outfits

This inspiration from prehistorical technology was my guide back to a more responsible way of making. Slower, more conscious, more responsible, more explorative. Several interactive outfits were made showing this process: E-textile Neanderthaler outfit, from felted wool, bark made into rope, flint tools, next to recycled electronic projects from my own electronic Stone Age. E-textile Archeologist outfit, with a felted vest, plastic bags with self made wooden tools as finds, together with plastic bags with old fashioned RFID readers. Redshift from felted wool and a mesh of copper strips, with modern e-textile version of the knotted skirt of the so called Egtved girl, a Danish Bronze Age site. Instead of functional, the outfits become storytelling. The outfits are unique, not to be mass produced. The outfits maybe pointing to a direction of making less damaging for our World.