Thoughts on Supporting Folk Design

Recently I’ve been getting back into making wire sculptures featuring tracks that marbles roll down. This is folk design:

• design: these sculptures mutually infuse elements of function (the marbles cannot fall off the tracks) and attention to form (the sculpture should look beautiful overall).
• folk: I am creating these sculptures as an amateur, purely for the pleasure of making them and for sharing them within my immediate, local social context. They’ll probably sit in my apartment once finished.

An early prototype from my first week back to working with copper wire.

Getting back into this medium has been an emotional roller coaster, testing my resilience and perseverance to the limit. This period of my life is pretty demanding, and I almost decided to quit several times over the first week.

I’d like to offer a few bulleted, unorganized perspectives on the unique demands on people practicing folk design. This is a first baby step toward developing an understanding of how best to support folk design in general.

• All design involves testing the unknown and listening to the resulting feedback. (“Design is what you do when intention exceeds known methodology” — Artful Design.) Folk designers, and especially folk designers who are very new to working in a medium, can be overwhelmed by the process of interpreting failures as useful feedback. Without domain knowledge, it can be really challenging to understand what is going wrong; without this understanding, it can feel almost impossible to know how to proceed.
• Ways of getting that critical interpretation to translate failure into feedback: mentorship, internet searches, just trying lots of ideas. The first two didn’t pan out for me much this week, and I got pretty discouraged by the third.
• Folk designers often need to depend on their local social context for help. In my case, I didn’t know anyone doing exactly what I wanted to do, but my friends were familiar with what I was doing and knew their way around the tools available to me. Casual conversations about the problems I was facing ended up generating ideas that were important for navigating around obstacles later on.
• The folk designer’s attitude is important. Carol Dweck’s concept of the growth mindset is one in which people interpret failure as information for how to grow toward success in the future; a fixed mindset is one where people interpret failure as reflective of an essential, unchangeable aspect of their character. All design involves learning from failure, but this can be especially tough in the folk context, wherein information and mentorship can be scarce. Having a growth mindset can help one be more resilient in the face of failure.

I hadn’t yet considered how vital the folk designer’s social network is to them. Our local social networks are not just the audience for the end result. They can and perhaps should be a source of mutual support, encouragement, and inspiration throughout the process of folk design.

Perhaps, folk design is important not just for the benefit of the folk designer, who accomplishes personally meaningful goals through creating functionally beautiful artifacts, but also for the health of their community. Could widespread practice of folk design result in tighter-knit local social groups? Since design benefits from the presence of diverse perspectives, could the practice of folk design be one that cultivates broader communities founded on relatedness, rather than unity (identical sameness)?

An exciting (to me) prototype for track that marbles cannot fall out of.

These are big questions, and I have no answers. For now, I’ll just be over here making my sculptures.

(A big thanks also to Sasha Leitman, who supported and mentored me during my initial process of learning to build these sculptures 3 years ago!)