shoemaker/teacher. The intention was to experiment
how new interfaces, protocols and publics could be
explored and developed between all these partici-
pants on the factory floor and facilitate a merger be-
tween design and production. The hope was to cre-
ate some new approaches to post-industrial
production and try to probe “nonlinear” means of
action and co-design, open for spontaneity and
crafty interventions during the normally strictly lin-
ear production process. Nonlinear in this sense
means to escape the undeviating and predictable se-
quential workflows in production and to blend
physical production of shoe co-design with renego-
tiations of delegation processes, instead see the fac-
tory floor as a rhizome of multiple overlapping, in-
tersecting and connecting lines of practice.
All the experimentation during the workshop was to
be firmly based on collaboration on the factory floor.
An ability to merge these roles and create a wider
range of possibilities for interaction between the
participants would change the flow within the fac-
tory, while at the same time create unique designs,
using the full skill of all those involved. This would
be something that was the opposite to top-down
Fordist production lines – the typical format in the
garment industry.
By using a hacktivist line of practice the work aimed
at creatively tinker and manipulate the flows and
collection of functions between the design and ma-
terialization processes in the factory. Hacking would
offer a possibility for the craftsmen to reclaim au-
thorship and break the pre-programmed intentions
of the production system. In the analogue practice of
shoe hacking this technique involved experiments
with the “software“ of production methods and
functions instead of altering the machine hardware
in the factory, something that the factory could not
afford.
Instead we intervened with small changes to the
practice and methods used at the factory, small
changes that would also be seen in the material out-
put of the shoes, but at the same time create larger
changes throughout the factory, in mindset of the
workers, the organization and amongst the local
community.
By using machines “wrongly” the need for technical
innovation and reinvestment was challenged. Oper-
ational misuse of the factory equipment, using ma-
chines at the wrong moment in the process, assem-
bling pieces in wrong order or using wrong sizes of
tools for various elements in production proved to
be ways that opened new action spaces. Here the
craftsmen could use their full skills in new ways to
experiment with the production process through
minimal adjustments in their practice.
In the sense of re-engaging the craftsmen in the pro-
duction process the project was similar to the utopi-
an experiments of William Morris and the Arts and
Craft movement in the end of the 19th century. At
that time, Morris was trying to address the falling
quality of mass produced goods as well as the alien-
ating work for factory workers. Morris suggested a
more thorough design process and a return to work
organized in medieval-style guilds. He even promot-
ed a specific style of clothing called “the aesthetic
dress” in a, for the time, minimalist looking medieval
style. Nonetheless, in the Arts and Craft movement
the designer was still the Auteur, the sole author of
the work, and the “liberated” craftsmen were happy
but obedient slaves to the Auteur’s will.
As such the hacking at Dale Sko was not about re-
placing the operating system of the factory with pure
craft or guild-like organization processes. On the
contrary it tried to escape master-apprentice rela-
tions, to trigger instead other forms of participation
and the sharing of ideas and skills throughout the
organization, creating larger shared action spaces.
This would mean co-design and co-authorship
throughout the process and creating a multiplicity of
interfaces for design interventions during the pro-
duction. This would not only affect the general proc-
ess or control of the facility itself, but also the design
of every unique product as workers would be able to
influence the production process. This can only be
done in small quantities, but still remain within
mass-production or economy of scale, and this mix
of craft and mass-production is the scale of manu-
facture for a small factory such as Dale Sko.
The protocol of the Sko Hack was not only to work
together with the craftsman and share ideas, or use
the existing materials for new forms, but also to use
the new recombined assemblages as forms of future
Lego-parts. The negotiations between designer and
craftsmen were aimed at creating a palette of possi-
ble parts for assembling into shoes. As much as pos-
sible of the design-assembly was delegated to the
worker, creatively combining the parts into a pair of
shoes where no pair looked like the other. To use an-