Finding joy

Mending and Making Do

A year ago I spoke at Pecha Kucha in Sheffield. My talk was titled Finding Joy. I was very nervous and as a result I (accidentally) got a little (very) drunk. Meaning my talk turned in to a moderately average 5 and a bit minute stand up routine which probably should have been titled “Drunk Lady gets a bit Flustered and Swears a lot”.
I’d like a second chance, so along with some of my slides I'm going to try to explain myself…

I work hard. I often work late nights and at weekends. I have a lot of ‘work/life balance’ conversations with friends. But when it comes down to it, I love what I do. My work, mostly, makes me really happy. I realise this isn't the same experience that everyone has and it makes me think a lot about luck and fortune, about chance and opportunity and about privilege. I'm very privileged.

I struggle with owning my joy. Do I deserve it? Will it be taken away if I don’t abide by some rule I missed a memo on? I'm quite superstitious, which is an inherited habit. My grandmother suffered a terrible loss which she entirely puts down to a room in her house, at the time, being painted green. I'm aware her avoidance of the colour green was a coping method. I don’t avoid green though. I'm fixated on seeing magpies, on seeing enough magpies.
“One for sorrow” relates to the magpie’s sorrow, they mate for life, if you see one alone it must be sad. It has nothing to do with my sorrow, or my joy. Sadly knowing this has no effect on me, it just means if I see a magpie I may wait, stare a little longer out of the window, to see if their mate will appear to help make sure my day is locked in as one of the good ones.

Frequently I'm fighting this internal battle around owning my own happiness while not dismissing my privilege but also recognising my own control over my situation… *draws breath*… But then on top of this is all of the DOOM. There’s a horrific amount of it. In news media and in films and books and games and culture generally there seems to be this constant onslaught of doom.

The world, by all accounts, has gone to hell in a handbag.

In the UK we've been forcibly placed in a state of austerity by a government that wasn't voted in, that has no clear mandate. How are they still in power? That the above slide is still relevant a year later bewilders me. At this stage in the talk I went on about protest and creativity. About how I don’t know how to protest. That I'm not sure if it would make any difference.

I also wanted to talk about the apparent lack of satire in our culture. But in the last year on that front I think things have changed. I think that we were all taken aback for the first year or so of the collation government. I know in Sheffield we were basically hanging our heads in shame for 18 months after Mr Clegg made his decision. We were too shocked to muster anything that looked like satire.

So all it feels like we've actually been doing is waiting. Waiting for something bigger than us to force us to make a change. We’re facing food crisis, climate crisis and a bubbling throbbing anger at the constant deepening divide between the haves and the have nots.

It’s all too much. It’s too much to deal with. I get this far in my thinking and my brain falls out of my ear. What can I do? I'm certainly no politician, I'm no poet, I'm no comedian, I'm no artist and I can’t be bothered with protest. I'm not sure I could make it work as a member of the Occupy movement, although I agree with some of the things I think that they’re on about. My core problem with them being a gender imbalance in their choice of masks and thier lack of specificity. I'm very task orientated… It’s just not for me.

Just over 4 years ago there was a Makers and Hackers day at Access Space in Sheffield. It was my first introduction in to what I now understand as the ‘maker revolution’. My kind of revolution. Something I can buy in to. As I said I love my work, I've been working in interactive media for 15 years but also I love to knit and craft. The idea that I could knit something and then attach it to a circuit board and give the knitted object a new purpose — fills me with joy.

I spent a day at Access Space teamed up with a group of electronic students and another maker/artist type and we hacked a mobile (a moving distracting thing for babies, not a phone.) I was pregnant at the time and my thoughts were very focused on sleep. The mobile had a clock and a sound sensor, a felt moon and sun each with LEDs. The intention being that if the child woke, depending on the time either the sun or the moon would light up accordingly. This was in the vain hope the a very small child might learn more quickly about why mummy was crying.

Since then a worldwide community has emerged. A community of people who want to make stuff. Who want to harness the potential and the abundance, the availability of technology to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. A community of people who have taken a ‘Make do and Mend’ approach to a completely new level.

Focusing on what I can do, I set about with friends to do something with and for this movement in my home town. In a space I can reach out and grab, possibly even hug if need be. What I wanted to do in my talk was to start to bring all those people in Sheffield together. By saying I was going to put on an event for this community to show off their work and to inspire and support each other. To help foster new connections and opportunities for them.

This weekend we held our first event and it was brilliant. And having set out to find joy, I found it on Saturday. 13 groups of makers. More than 13 different projects and approaches took time out from their weekend to share their work. The staff and students Sheffield Hallam University Design department stepped up and helped in so many ways. This is where joy is, for me. People, being nice to each other.

My last slide. Because if all else fails and I still haven’t got any meaning across, this is what I maintain as my first rule. If I feel like I've stepped out of line I check myself against this rule. If I have, I do everything I can to make sure I mend it.

There is more. Much more. Each of these themes has more discussion to it. But this was a PK talk a 20/20 blast through my thinking at the time. As it happens it’s still my thinking a year later.