The factory, in the past the main employer and gem of the town, now demonstrates
an imaginative and innovative spirit with high future ambitions and is now once
again the source of local pride. It is a meeting place between the global fashion
system and local quality production. Designers and producers meet here for prac-
tical dialogue in collaborative design processes and here they can bring together
clusters of “material publics” and negotiate issues in regard to the production proc-
ess. In Dale small publics of specific value are created – material, economic, crafty
and mythical – and they all can all call the production process their own.
This could mean that Dale, a small town in the Norwegian countryside with 1500
inhabitants, no longer is a place where the signals of fashion only can be received
in magazines distributed from afar. Fashion cannot only be read in Dale, but in-
stead is a place where fashion is now written. Fashion is not only enacted here but
also co-produced. Dale Sko is a place where the craftsmen are more fashion-able.
&
Following this line through this chapter we have seen how delegation processes in
participatory work are of crucial importance to keep the processes open but still
manageable. In the facilitation work of the designer it is important to be conscien-
tious when designing these protocols. This allows for others to build on the com-
mon work and it also facilitates the workshop processes themselves. Likewise, the
point of these interventions is to find better ways to plug-into the system, and offer
a multiplicity, or MORE possible alternatives, rather than oppose and limit the ac-
tion spaces. Here the “provotype” becomes a special tool for the designer with
which new possibilities, previously unimagined by the participants, are modelled
to create new ideas to be actualized by the cooperating community.
As in the example of the Swap-O-Rama-Rama these types of public events can cre-
ate special temporary fashion scenes where visitors become co-producers and share
material and skills. The point here is not to use the scene to “drop out” of the sys-
tem, but use it as a platform for renegotiating the terms of the re-entry and the
ways to communally plug-in.
The experiment at Dale Sko showed how small change protocols can be an essen-
tial part of design practice when examining how to hack or “update” production.
By using the existing infrastructure and production flows, but bending them in
collaboration with the craftsmen on the floor, new possibilities emerge that can
quite easily be manifested into new products, which as something proved to be the
case at Dale Sko. Here, future projects can explore how to intersect more values and
approaches to the shared production process. Local history, narratives and myths
can be other materials to cooperatively hack and thus add more shared resources
to local production.
By using protocols, symbiogenetic relations can be formed if the designer just sur-
renders some control thus creating a mutualistic relation to the production facility
and delegating co-design work to the craftsperson. This can allow the products
produced to mutate and change over time, resulting in unexpected but negotiated
end results in which all the participants have been engaged in the design process
and added and developed their expertise.