Thoughts on Amish Barn Raising

Haven’t written much on here in a while, mostly due to the fact that its only just over a month until the end of year show and presentations. I’m currently going through the process of trying to put all of my work this year into some kind of coherent structure, hoping that I eventually find out how to wrap it all up.

In an intense tutorial/end-of-the-world-showdown a few weeks ago, the phenomenon of Amish barn-raising was mentioned in relation to my project. I nodded and pretended to know what it was. Much later, I thought I should probably find out.

A barn raising is exactly the sort of collaborative social event that I have been researching and becoming interested in over the last few months or so. An entire community comes together, and through working together and relying upon one another, they are able to build a barn in about two days.

There is an interesting mix of organisation and absolute amateurism within these groups – there is much preparation done before the raising, which then allows less experienced or skilled members of the community to still play an important role. Participants are not paid, and all able-bodied members of the community are expected to play a part. The payment for the individual instead comes in the form of camaraderie, a great sense of social achievement, and the possibility that now that you’ve scratched someone else’s back, they might scratch yours.

The preparation is integral to it working – parts are constructed separately in the lead up, with different parts being made my people with different specialities or interests. It is this process of working separately first that makes it possible, and that sets up the “event” – the sense of event being necessary to summoning the required manpower and energy to complete the building as quickly as possible.

It sounds like a Big Society project, doesn’t it? Thing is, the communities that partook (and in some cases, still do) in such things existed very much in a world either before or outside of the capitalist society that we now live in. And in our world, the mentality that affords barn raising seems far more idealistic than realistic.

I’m interested in this idea though, perhaps not as a way of building things but as a metaphor – of how a local network of individuals can co-operatively create something greater than what they could ever achieve alone.

Haircut

So recently I’ve been making a bunch of these little films where I get some people to perform various everyday tasks – the difference being that they are forced to rely upon or co-operate with one another in order to achieve their goal.

One afternoon in the pub, Matt House suggested that he have his hair cut by a few people at once, for the sake of my project. A very noble gesture. And very brave, considering the beautiful, long flowing hair that he (used to) have.

We got three experienced (well, kind of) scissor-smiths in to do the job – Anisha, Jigna and Natalia. Once again, I filmed it and cut it down to make the viewing experience less arduous.

Were Matt’s precious long locks savagely ruined, or transformed into a wonderful new barnet? Theres only one way to find out.

 

There you go. A pretty stylish haircut I’d say.  Not sure what to say about this one, it was just a quick video done one morning when I didn’t have too much else to do. I didn’t really design anything there. Maybe need to stop

I’m not sure if I’d personally like the three-barber experience because I hate getting my hair cut. But if you don’t mind a little bit of attention, maybe next time, do it this way.

Building Ikea Together

Challenging private use and consumption of objects has been central to what I’ve been doing recently. Well, this and my secret goal in life, which I think is to make everything in the world more like Lego.

So, I reasoned, it was time to accept the inevitable and do some IKEA hacking. I took an IKEA kit, in this case a “Kullen” chest of drawers, and set about how I might fragment or rearrange it to make sociability, sharing and co-operation intrinsic to its existence.

I went through the instructions, splitting them into four separate books, each only containing a quarter of the guidelines to making the cabinet. Then I repackaged the components into four boxes, the contents each corresponding to their respective fragmented instruction manuals.

I gave these four boxes to four different people,  put them in a room, set up a camera, and said go:

And there you have it – one 2-drawer KULLEN cabinet. Look at them, aren’t they proud?

I think you could call it a success. I love how they hit nails in for each other at the end – it was a change in behaviour that was not in any way dictated by the instructions, but arised as a result of the way the task was designed. Which is good.

The way the instructions were used surprised me too – much less based on a sequence and taking turns, but in a more fluid and collaborative way, bringing them all together in the middle and discussing how each stage links with another. Matt, who had the least pieces in his box and therefore the least “to do”, took the role of making the other people’s instructions make sense together. Its interesting to see how different people react to these situations.

There’s no doubt, once again, that doing this alone would be quicker – it took the guys about 40-45 minutes to finish the thing. But all this has nothing to do with efficiency. I’ll write more on this another time.

Thanks to Ben, Matt, Mikey and Zahra for  so wonderfully displaying their IKEA prowess.