✹ Cement pouring workshop
19th May 2022
This last few weeks I get to help with the workshop for Product and Furniture design year1 at Chelsea, concreate pouring workshop, first week it was about making mold from plywood and thinking about how to create a proper mold for concreate to be poured in and have a proper way for bubbles to escape. At first I didn’t understand much about the bubble part, some of the group needs to make more complicated mold for the sake of bubble escaping channel, Junior, the tutor of this workshop insisted to do so as it’s going to give more satisfying result. He makes cement furniture for a living, even the student didn’t understand about the bubble thing, they did as Junior suggested anyway
Here comes this week, it’s time to test out if the molds work. In total there are 10 groups and each group has about 5-7 people. The design though, didn’t come from the member within their group but were selected from the individual during the presentation stage which may or may not get to work on their own design. The challenge, I found is that they need to work out how to make a mold from someone else’s design, the designer of each piece has briefly thought about the process of making before but when come the production stage, many things need to be changed according to the advice of the tutor, the unexpected circumstances or the shortage of the material
Later when the cement was poured, the bubble escape channel does help a lot with the bubble, a lot of them is trapped in the bottom of the mold and need vibration to get them to the surface, I learned a lot about the material, the intensity of concreate is completely different from what I imagine, bubbles as well as the formula of the mixer are also new to me.
Also as I got to oversee almost every groups and I’m so excited to see they build something from scratch like this, moreover as this project requires many people to work together, it gives so much sense of togetherness to me, I love seeing people help others building something as the essence of craft, for me is the tool for people to connect to each other. This is the first time year1 got to work together as well and it came out quite nicely. Not every student turn up to be present throughout the project but I think it’s the nature of human, what we can do is notice what each of them good at and what each of them enjoy doing, this is what I found since when I worked in the student union during my BA, we got to do this king of project where we need as many people as possible to help, but sometime when they came they didn’t know what to do, where to be or why do we need them for. I believe that everyone wants to help as long as it makes them feel valued, that’s why we have to figure out what they like to do. But so far in this cement pouring project, I don’t think it was too bad, just the beginning of something, next time I’m sure they will get more idea of what to do and where to be in term of helping each other to achieve their project.
