Ella Doran: my URGE
We have asked each member of URGE to share their reasons for being part of the collective and their hopes for how it will help build a better future. Here, designer Ella Doran shares her URGE
I’m a creator, a doer, a textiles designer, who creates designs for products for people...I bring creative flow to a situation, and I help inspire the narrative to help others tap into their own creativity. As a designer I’m not exclusive, I’m inclusive. I lecture, teach, and run workshops, alongside running my web-shop and interior practice.
My project at Yorkshire Sculpture Park From Sheep to Seat, Fleece to Floor (shown below), aimed to re-examine and shine a light on circular processes and materials such as wool.
My URGE is to create/build/inhabit a space; a hub, a ‘Haus’ that embodies our collective values, that asks questions, and hosts URGE’nt debates, that engages and educates the next generation. If the Haus became physical not just virtual, it could fix things, it could make things, run workshops and skunkworks ... learning through doing.
Since the pandemic, we have seen that community can be powerful, adaptive and caring. We have all felt the potency and value of our social economy and community, and the need for everyone’s good health and wellbeing. We want to harness this in URGE.
My URGEncy is to help promote the wake-up call that we have been given in this moment, and to collectively advance on the raised awareness around the well-being of all life.
I have made or been part of making ‘products’ for over 25 years, thousands of products, in volume and design through my own manufacture and that of my licensors. It was over 10 years ago when I started to engage with re-use and re-designing old furniture, this led me to a residency at the RSA’s Great Recovery Project with (fellow URGE member) Sophie Thomas.
We started at a waste site looking at bulky waste and we ended up focussing our research and findings on the retrieval of a perfectly good sofa that was headed for landfill due to the missing fire label.
The Survivor Sofa film (above, directed by Paul Wyatt) inspired a bigger dialogue and had huge influence on TV shows of today such as The Repair Shop and Money for Nothing, but we have yet to properly influence the re-use label conundrum: legislation still prohibits re-use without a fire label. One of my URGEs remains to continue to lobby for this.
There is much work to do in order to promote more ‘closed loops’. And my part in URGE’s community of specialists could support, inspire and promote this transformation. Through workshops, through Life Cycle Assessments, from individuals to large scale companies. We could build carbon literacy events for businesses and the public through the lens of design and art-based activities and workshops.
My own company is working with our manufacturers and collaborators to close as many loops as possible in the stream of materials and manufacturing processes we share together. We have shifted from a stock-holding company to only making to order the products that are required.
We know our economy is built on stories, and it’s time we told new ones, more inclusive and more circular ones, less carbon making and more carbon sequestering. These stories will lead the way ... I imagine URGE helping to bring this urgency to the agency – to companies, to brands to help them tell new stories to inspire new words, new codes, new curiosity, new energy, new making strategies, new production models, new behaviours, new gifts, and new pleasures. Let’s get going!
For more about URGE, go to urgecollective.com or subscribe here on Substack