“In July, the Forum for Exchange and Excellence in Design (FEED) in Pune featured Carleton Professor H. Masud Taj, architect, poet and calligrapher, who addressed a large gathering of students from all [5] Indian colleges of architecture, along with professors and professionals, delivering a public lecture entitled guftgu – A Conversation about Architecture”

Roseann O’Reilly Runte
President & Vice-Chancellor, Carleton University
Canada-India Centre Newsletter

Photographs: courtesy FEED

Cross Reference. See also:
"Interview by India Abroad" in Interview Section
"Mosque: Cube and Circle" in Articles Section
Jellyfish" in Poetry Section

The cigar box guitar has a long history in the USA, where it formed part of the culture of traditional blues music and became a popular DIY project. Despite the growth in popularity of the blues in the UK, the penchant for constructing cigar box guitars did not travel with it. This article explores the recent appearance of the instrument and the culture surrounding it in the UK as a particular form of cultural DIY activity combining individual design and production with collective performance, which has in some cases grown far beyond an amateur hobby into a professional business.

There is a developing awareness of the interconnected nature of design, its connections with other disciplines and the convergence of different design disciplines as boundaries are increasingly contested and transgressed. Yet, to my mind, the most significant boundary currently not only being crossed but being dismantled is the boundary between professional and amateur, or more pertinently, between ‘designer’ and ‘user’. Recent design methodology has stressed the importance of taking a user-centred approach, but has not envisioned a position where designer and user are essentially one and the same. This change in perspective has the potential to transform design education, design practice and the consumption of design.

As design practice became more specialized and the technology involved became more esoteric, amateur creative involvement in many disciplines became unattainable. Yet, emerging technologies today in fact offer the potential to reduce dependence on professional design, and afford access to advanced production techniques.

Describing a recent exhibition in which visitors to the gallery had the opportunity to not only create designs for products on screen, but have them actually manufactured and displayed as a part of the show, this paper describes the choices made by designers and craft makers developing such systems, and explores the tensions between professional and amateur creative activity. An exploration is also made of the issues raised for design education and the potential impact of systems that remove distinctions not only between different design disciplines but also between designer and user.