020 REPORTER
Right Zoe Laughlin co-founded the Institute of Making in 2010
Below Laughlin explains how her experiments into everyday objects offer both a scientific outcome and a new ‘layer of meaning’ to the object in day to day life
PROFILE Dr Zoe Laughlin
Designer, maker, engineer and broadcaster Zoe Laughlin is passionate about deconstructing everyday items. She talks about her work as co-founder of the Institute of Making, and the importance of exploring our relationship with materials and waste
WORDS BY SOPHIE TOLHURST
WHAT DO YOU think of when you see a spoon? You’ll think about eating, about taste; you might imagine putting that spoon in your mouth, perhaps. Dr Zoe Laughlin spends her time considering, and making, things – like a set of spoons in different metals, a cymbal made of glass, imaginary rocks, a paper clip that springs back into place, or architectural elements 3D printed in clay. The latter, various iterations of which she waves at me over the Zoom link, have been proving dificult. The material they can’t quite get to grips with here? ‘The ancient wonder that is clay, used for millennia to make stuff,’ Laughlin says. The dificulty, she clarifies, ‘is not building a 3D printer that can print clay – it’s getting the clay right so that it can be printed. And it’s very temperamental, and that’s a real craft’. Much of what Laughlin does is through the Institute of Making (IoM), set up in 2010 with
co-founders Mark Miodownik and Martin Conreen. They have a number of staff, experts in different areas – including a ceramicist who will be helping to solve that clay problem at some point in the future. The institute’s name both acknowledges and riffs on its university setting (University College London), balanced with the more informal notion of ‘making’ – predating its recent resurgence, Laughlin notes. The IoM’s premise is simple: established to
‘celebrate and explore the relationship between materials and processes’, it is a place where people from across disciplines can come together with the goal of making stuff. But it also presents a challenge to how research is typically ‘presented, and embodied and recorded’ in a university setting, Laughlin explains. ‘There’s a whole lot of knowledge that isn’t done like that, and isn’t communicated like that, and isn’t learnt like that and isn’t experienced like that, and making is something that is hard to learn if you
don’t do it. It’s a practice. Be that a practice that might in one realm be called open-heart surgery, or broadcasting, or blacksmithing.’ This broad embrace of making is typical of the multidisciplinary approach of Laughlin and her fellow IoM colleagues and members. Laughlin herself is an artist, designer, engineer, materials scientist and broadcaster. When I ask her what came first, or where her interest in making first originated, she says that it is hard to pinpoint. There were ‘some really seminal sensations around materials and processes and making that I can remember from a very young age,’ she says. ‘I had a bedside table that was made of pine, and the grain of the wood was really pronounced. And I discovered that if you run your incisor down some of the pine it went in, and some of it was hard and didn’t... So then I sort of engraved the entire surface [...] I’m basically ruining this piece of furniture but discovering something about the material.’ That wasn’t the last time Laughlin would damage things in the name of knowledge: I’ve seen a video clip of her gleefully dashing an unassuming-looking round object – in fact a sample of the second-hardest material after diamond – at a mug on live TV, causing it to smash. ‘My phrase would be: “damage is a revealer of materiality”. How things break tells you a lot about what they’re like’, she explains. While education tends to silo art, design and engineering, Laughlin believes in looking for the ‘biggest umbrella’ under which to play. For her own higher education, Laughlin chose the less prescriptive route of art college, where students could do whatever interested them – including scientific experiments. Laughlin completed a MA in scenography and sculpture from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and a PhD in materials within the division of engineering at King’s College London. Returning to those spoons, she explains how
in a ‘pure science experiment’ they would likely have cut basic spoons out of metal sheet they had to hand, but with her approach: ‘Well, there’s an object that exists in relation to the mouth, which is the spoon, and it is 100 times
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