Making Matters

I ended my week with the wonderful forum for the 100 Hours project. We had a day of rich discussions and ideas, from which I'm sure much will come over the next months. You can read through the tweets from the day for now, and get a sense of the ideas that came up. One theme that recurred for me was the importance of considering the making and manufacturing processes behind our objects - certainly something particularly central to my consideration of my printing plates for weather maps. The collaborative nature of the project has nicely echoed the interlocking groups of people that are usually behind the creation of any object.

These ideas were, therefore, nicely symbolised for me on visits to two projects yesterday. Firstly, I experienced the extraordinary 'Museum of Water', which is currently at Somerset House, and is a brilliant combination of spectacle and participation. Atmospherically displayed in the dripping basements of Somerset House, artist Amy Sharrocks brings together bottles of water donated with special meaning or memories by members of the public.

The shelves of ranged bottles had nice visual parity with the 'materials library' at my next stop, the wonderful Institute of Making at UCL. The Institute is normally open only to members of the University, but had a special open day yesterday with a 'Festival of Stuff'. When I visited, every activity, from trying liquid nitrogen ice cream, to learning spoon carving, 3D printing, or moulding polymorph plastics, was heaving with enthralled visitors of all ages. In our increasingly digital age (in which I live enthusiastically through the ephemeral tweet and blog) its nice to see that making still matters. To evidence that, I also made a spoon.