If you work from home in Bow Carlotta Novella would like to talk to you for her her study of modern cottage industry and home-based production in East London.
We’ve received this request from Carlotta. Please help if you can by contacting her by telephone/email below.
I’m a student of MA Architecture at Central Saint Martins in London working together with the art and architecture practice public works. I’ve been suggested to contact you by Tom Maher from Circle Housing Old Ford in relation to my thesis project on “Modern Cottage Industry and home-based production” in East London. – please find below a short description of the project .
For this study I’m in the process of contacting makers and entrepreneurs from East London, more precisely from the area of Bow, that are working from home and/or using the markets and festivals in the high-streets to sell their work……..I was wondering if you knew of anybody living in the area that has a manufacture/creative business based at home.
All the very best,
Carlotta Novella
MA Architecture CSM
+44 7926710660
c.novella@hotmail.it
carlotta@publicworksgroup.net
Modern Cottage Industries and Urban Home-based Production
Study on domestic adaptation and professional production in the household and in the community.
Small scale domestic manufacturing business and artisan home-based workshops are successfully developing in the modern cities, boosting the market of quality handmade products which have always been a source of pride in the UK.
Although the government is currently announcing the development of new measures to support home-based entrepreneurs, for many the route to become an independent and successful producer and retailer is long and sometimes impossible due to lack of resources and space.
My intent is to develop a study that collect life experiences and making narratives about modern entrepreneurs and their domestic workshops and studios, in order to delineate the methodology they adopted and adapt it to facilitate the introduction of new home-based economies as alternative sources of income.
The first aim of the study is to profile the adaptation and transformation of the dwelling space of the single or family in order to include a specific working environment – equipment, tools, machinery, storage space -. I will investigate the hybridised spaces of the house which are shaped by the processes of ‘transformation’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘appropriation’, vital for the creation of a living/working environment, both functional for the persona and the maker.
The definition of the space needed for certain typologies of production -from a knitting chair to a room suitable to accommodate a kiln- will then allow me to understand which are the necessities for the ordinary citizen to make his/her house productive.
But the house can be intended also as a community, a group of makers.
Therefore the second aim of the project is to identify what happen when the scale of the production involves more than one family/house.
One example of this bigger prospective of the possible domestic making space is represented by the housing estate in the city.
Through the contact with the micro-social and micro-cultural practices in a specific housing estate I hope to find existing methods of production, made with and for the community, which could be facilitated and upgraded to become a source of income for the community. Including processes of re-skilling, skill sharing, social network building and mutual learning, my intent is to outline and encourage current and future processes of ‘networking’ and ‘use of city infrastructures’ through the idea of making. Using the introduction of alternative projects, which foster local and trans-local networks, new methods of self-management, self-building, and self-production, I hope to activate new practices of communing through the home-based production, that could economically and politically empower the residents in the act of making.