Clare: It’s interesting because, as a designer, one of the things that I’ve been working on recently and, actually, I didn’t have to design – it’s not really my specialism at all – but I did have an input on – was this assembly we did at the weekend. 

So I just spent the last weekend on zoom all day, both days, and quite a lot of Friday evening, doing this online People’s Assembly for a movement that I’ve been working on called the Humanity project, and it’s about developing ways to get a grassroots wave of self organised democratic participation to happen. So it’s not the same job at all as getting a load of people to sort of go, oh shit, I’m ready, this is urgent, let’s go and do something, you know, quite radical and empowering and impactful and all of that, it’s much more…

It’s much more like hard work, relational, long, bit slower, a bit more like a community organising model more than a sort of fast mobilisation, but it’s interesting looking at the design of how you can run these processes and make them yourselves and not need to be… what did I say yesterday afternoon?… we’ve just proved that you don’t have to be posh or rich to be able to put on an assembly, right? Because it’s kind of the remit of the quite elite people who command quite high fees to do this very good facilitation work and all the governance, and all of that, and it’s all good – if you do it well. It needs to be done well! But it’s also completely out of reach of people who aren’t resourced, and it means that the professional people will literally bite the hand off someone in Number 10 Downing Street to work with them. But they’ll look at me and go. You’re not very good for my reputation. So we need to get paid £££ amount. So we’re trying to bridge between those spaces… and what came out of it. We wanted to do this deliberation on various different issues and ask the big wide open question – what kind of country do we want to be?… together… what kind of country do we want to live in?… and come up with a bunch of recommendations? And vote for them at the end in quite a crude process, just vote them into what’s the most top thing… 

And what I’ve found really interesting was that the first thing on the list – that won by quite a lot – was just having a very radical overhaul of the education system, which would prepare people… I think it said something like… teach children to grow food, and teach the emotional and practical skills that you will need to go into a highly uncertain future.

I thought that was so interesting. 

How everyone went, you know, yeah, we need to change the Constitution of the Nation, or we think we need a different political system, new economics. Yeah. You know health pre-emptive, preventative, all this sort of systemic thinking but actually the top one was education. 

Becky: Although I would say that’s always the top one – in my experience of these conversations – that’s what people think the answer’s got to be, to go back to this sort of earlier stage and prevent this happening later on.

Clare: Right.

Becky: It does tend to be. What people sort of want to happen is… and the poor education system… and you were mentioning working in schools? I worked in schools as well and helped my own kids through school. And they grow their own food in their school in West London, and we’ve done various uniform clothing recycling, fundraising. I mean, there’s no end of activities happening all the time.

The bedrock of STEM subjects is still there. Ofsted are grading the school on those, because those are not the movable things. That’s the thing that your assembly is really talking about is how can we shift the bedrock offer and the values therein – the bedrock of STEM subjects? What happens is that we’re actually teaching and offering all of those other resilient practices around the STEM subjects, putting more pressure on the parents and staff to deliver even more. 

I’m smiling because my kids came through that system and then into the secondary school where there’s even less – there’s just the STEM subjects. You don’t get involved as parents particularly because your kids don’t want you to come anywhere near them, you know? [laughter]…

But also they just go off into whatever’s going to make them happy. And no matter what they learn, I can’t get them to weed the garden with me at home. I can’t get them to, well, I can slightly get them to shop differently – but I still have five mountains of laundry at the weekend, which is mostly from the floor and only worn once. They’re humans, you know, and what worries me about putting everything into redesigning the education system is – all kinds of stuff happens later on, and, you know, all kinds of stuff happens to us as people, and our behaviours change for so many reasons and you can’t sort of prepare and predict quite as much as we want to. In a way I almost feel like the missing building blocks are much later on for behaviour change and for attitude. But it’s also broader than in these hallowed halls of education, it’s ‘the everything’.

We get all kinds of students here [Chelsea School of Art / University of the Arts London]. From all walks of life, all countries, all backgrounds. You’ve seen it, how multicultural it is and how diverse in age it is, and how many subjects are studied here. And practically all of them dress themselves with the same habits, and the trend will move like wildfire around the campus.

I just think in the heat of the moment, people behave in a way that suits them. And I’m not sure what I’m concluding with this, other than my teenagers make me laugh because I’ve spent so long trying to educate them in every possible way. [laughter] When it comes down to it they just want to vape and to hang out with their friends and nothing gets in the way, you know? And they’re good people, they’re good people. That’s what they’re going to do – I just hope the seeds have been planted, that they come round a bit later on. 

But why don’t we talk about your assembly? You made me think of Ezio Manzini and that whole Cultures of Resilience thing. UAL did this big project [with him]. He’s been the godfather of this kind of thinking for a long time. We need to have these different local camps that are self-sufficient, self organised, resilient, democratic. But they are a kind of exchange in trade and support each other. You know, sort of like, a set of connected islands. Where the islands are protected from big politics but are self-sustaining camps, that all talk to each other… and you made me think of that because, I mean, he [Ezio] was writing about that in the early 2000s.

Ezio Manzini, connected islands and a new future.

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Clare: Yeah, it feels like to me at the moment the best thing that I can imagine doing, which I’m going to try and work out how we can do, is to imagine how you have a country which is different in all of the good ways, that you’d like to make it different, and then make a whole load of that happen – rather than trying to get it to happen out there, find your way to make it happen – and when you see it, you’ll go, “Fucking hell, that’s better.” 

Becky: That’s it, that’s it… 

Clare: And in a way it also relates back to the sort of early stuff, when I first met you, I would have been doing stuff with the Space Hijackers. Which was really based on situationism – going out, doing weird things in public spaces. Taking over a tube train so you can throw a party on it or going outside the arms fair and pretending to be an arms dealer with a tank, and then pretending to auction it off to get everyone to notice that’s what they’re doing in one of the world’s biggest arms fairs. 

And there was a lot of that sensibility in the origins of Extinction Rebellion –  we went out and did these audacious things in public spaces and took them over. And Oxford Circus wasn’t a place for shopping, it was a place for dancing. It was a place for listening to each other. It was a place for, like, covering the tarmac with soil and taking your shoes off. All of the things that happened were kind of – we’re just gonna change this place and see if we like it better – and if it can become a totally different place, and it really did for a while – and the same on Waterloo Bridge – cover it with the trees and a skate ramp and bales of hay, and there you go, it’s a totally different place. 

A totally different place. 

That feels to me like – but the conditions around us have changed, and, obviously, the political conditions have changed a lot. 

It’s very difficult to park a boat in Oxford Circus and leave it there for a week – that’s not going to happen now.

Becky: They’re on your tail as soon as you get it out of the water! 

Clare: Yeah. But there is definitely loads of scope to create a new world without having to ask for permission, and it doesn’t have to be in an obstructive way where you’re going to immediately get the attention of the authorities. You can do it in other ways, and I think that to speak to that Manzini sort of sensibility… 

Becky: And that’s perfectly aligned to the core Buckminster Fuller educational attitude of ‘build it and they will come’. The art school is the place where you create these visions. The whole point of innovation being that you’re building something better; that people didn’t even realise they needed. But they love it. And they want it. And it’s so much better than the old system that was – exploitative and exhausting and expensive. And for me that would be the absolutely perfect definition of the kind of research and innovation that we could do from the educational position – of just showing these alternative futures that people didn’t know were possible. 

But now, with your facilitation, this idea of how you bring people and get them activated, plus my system’s thinking, pipeline building of big funded projects, there seems there is a way to build these future scenarios together and make them real, have people experience them and actually start to… that’s where we can come back to my kids, they will do it as long as it’s fun! It’s got to involve the things that actually make them happy as young people. Rather than telling them no no, no, no, no!  You’ve got to go – yeah, over here! [laughter]. 

Yeah, this is a great challenge. 

Clare: And it’s also something that relates massively to fashion for me, because, it’s like, the concept of fashion or the practice of being involved in fashion… When I was younger, before I moved to London, I was in school and I was interested in fashion. I was interested in the fact that when the clothes came out in that shade of red, I’d been longing for that shade of red and I knew it was coming, or that when things came out, they made sense to me, that I’d go, oh, that makes so much sense to me – they’re doing this and that – you know, it somehow felt like you were in the flow of it, you were sort of connected to other people, or a collective kind of imagination, or a psychology that was sort of going somewhere that made some sense, it didn’t shock you and make you think, oh, we didn’t see that coming.

And that was definitely something that I liked about fashion. And now I think things have gone so fast and WGSN, and trends…

Becky: It taught you to see the future, and it allowed you to use those skills. To see a better future. 

Clare: Yeah, but maybe the trend agencies [WGSN etc] have sort of broken it, you know, because everything’s… 

Becky: Everything’s broken by people monopolising the best ideas. You know, we’ll make these better visions and better ways of living… but before you know it, the system will be corrupted by people making money from it… where we’ve said “no, no, that’s not the point!” [laughter]. 

Yeah, futures, that’s an important skill. I changed my job title from Chair of Sustainable Fashion Textile Design to Chair of Circular Design Futures because I wanted to spend my time focusing on the future, not the NOW of the industry – where we can take this, and actually draw people there. Because I was able to tell the story of how that was better, you know, rather than be behind it or push, trying to push it in the right direction. You know, change, flip the way that I want to do it. Tell stories and share knowledge… 

Clare: Yes, it’s so important, so much critical – everything, and not enough – could just be like that… that’d be better, wouldn’t it?

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