Make and Undo is a design philosophy that aims to break down the distance between designer and user. The project culminated in a website that displays episodes of a fictional TV programme.

Instead of designing and refining the objects themselves, I designed the instructions to make the objects. This alligns with my theory of designing a platform for the user, and not a prescriptive (and inevitably inadequate) 'solution' to their presumed needs.

Make and Undo is an exploration of the design process, and an embodiment of the values I've come to possess as a designer. It is a tangled up ball of many strands, and by collating them under the title 'Make and Undo - a design philosophy' I've made an attempt to make sense of it all. Effectively it's a narrative of narratives.

If you consider the design process of traditional consumerism/mass production, the user comes pretty low down in the equation. The designer makes assumptions - it is always an assumption no matter how much market research is conducted - about the user's wants and needs, and builds this into the product through form/functionality. If you acknowledge (as I do) the part that the objects we surround ourselves with have to play in our identity construction, this process has worrying implications. A designer, from a distance, is shaping the behaviour and identity expression of the user.

My intention was therefore to divorce the design process from this 'averaging' technique, and reject the consumption of paraphernalia that distances us from our original sense and expression of self. The products of this remote design for mass production are too bland, unimaginative, and formed for assimilation into society as it is - not as it could be.

There are two main strands to the Make and Undo design process: 1. The manufacture/assembly of one's own objects, 2. The subversive element in them that resists, reclaims, or pokes fun at the more restrictive elements of societal control. The user's place in the design process is now elevated in line with the designer's. The object is a prop for the user to bring to life. The objects of Make and Undo are narrative tools, rather than prescriptive icons.

I would call this Projective Consumption. The user is not penned in or defined by the objects they consume. It promotes an engagement between user and object, illustrated by the Testimonials page of the website. A headteacher making an object called 'The School Report Destroyer' creates a rather more poignant narrative than just me, a lefty student, doing the same. There is a creative interplay between your status within society - politically, philosophically, in terms of race, class, gender, all the things that create our outward disposition within the bigger picture - and your engagement with the object.

Looking to the future, I'm hoping to open out the theatre of Make and Undo. This probably means enabling user submission to the database of downloadable instructions. However, it needs to be clearly differentiated from just being a lesser version of Instructables, keeping the resistant, subversive elements of the objects, and their rich narratives, firmly in tact.