“The future needs a new relationship with making. A forward-thinking, backward-looking, sideways-stepping kind of making. A making born of the imaginative use of skills. Something like fixing.” From the introduction to Brave Fixed World curated by Daniel Charny for the Lodz Design Festival, Poland 2014.

Drawing on his 25 years of experience in design and design education, and his work with makers in exhibitions such as the V&A’s seminal Power of Making (2011), Charny will reflect on attitudes to making and the role designers can play as agents of change through repair.

The talk will include insights into recent projects including Fixperts (launched 2012), Maker Library Network (launched 2013) and in particular from Fixhub (2014) a prototype for a community makerspace dedicated to fixing.

Charny will also touch on today’s making communities, their relationship with repair and question what lies behind the current drive of making activity.

Daniel Charny is an internationally recognised creative director, curator and educator in the field of contemporary design. He is co-founder and director of From Now On and Fixperts. Charny curated major design shows including the popular and critically acclaimed V&A and Crafts Council exhibition Power of Making and is creative director of the Maker Library Network which is one of the legacies from that show. He has worked closely with the Design Museum on their future permanent collection display. He was the founding curator of the Aram Gallery. Charny is professor of design at Kingston University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum.