picture of Ma ke from Victoria & Albert collection

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Eva Zeisel

Eva Zeisel turns 103.  Thank you to Haute*Nature for bringing this working woman’s birthday to our attention and for posting her TED Talk which I hadn’t seen.

Eva is a fully decorated *design revolutionary and **lifetime achiever (*New York Magazine, **Cooper Hewitt) and then some.

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I had my students read this article about socially useless companies, a descriptor I like even better than ‘socially responsible’ which is already a buzz word that has been bandied into meaninglessness.  Instead of thinking about how you might,as a company ‘do your part’, the idea of social uselessness makes you consider whether you should be in business in the first place. I personally have a fantasy of wiping the corporate slate clean with all new business models instead of watching the old geezers limp along like the wounded brittle giants they are so the word ‘useless’ struck me as did Ma ke’s work, found on Design Boom:

Ma ke

This fashion designer from China, who spoke at the ICOGRADA Beijing World Design Congress 09, writes Design Boom, “confronted by the local clothing industry with its cheap, homogenizing mass-production and poorly paid workers… and by a fashion scene lacking local aesthetic influence and dominated by foreign labels… dedicated herself to developing her ‘useless’ (‘wu yong’ translates to ‘useless’) ideas.” (ideas of uselessness). The results are breathtaking. She’s doing what nobody I know of in China is doing, communicating the roots of Chinese design and tradition. I want more.

Here is a link to a review of a documentary, also called Useless about her work and Chinese factory conditions made by Jia Zhangke.

Photos by Zhou Mi.

-C Zalkin

Related posts:

1. What Women Bring to the Table – Designers, Artists, Thinkers, & Inventors to Start the Week
2. Women in Sustainability – Part I