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Urban Conservatory

A Practice for Everyday Life

Voted Creative Futures 2003 (hosted by Creative Review Magazine), A Practice for Everyday Life is a young London-based design company, formed by Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas. Incorporating the environment and drawing inspiration from everyday life, their products and projects suggest a subtle humour by highlighting things that tend to go unnoticed. We asked them about their Urban Conservatory and how the Grey Blanket project helped raise awareness of city pollution.

Can you explain further the name of your company A Practice For Everyday Life?

We didn’t want our company name to be our names. I suppose we liked the idea of being personally anonymous to our projects and choosing a name which represented more what the company does, rather than us, Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas. We both read and enjoyed a particular book, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and realised our working process related to it. Everyday Life is something that we use as inspiration, from what is often taken for granted. Our work often draws upon everyday ephemera. Our inspiration and we hope our work is located in real life, in the language of the banal, the ordinary and familiar. I suppose we prefer to present things as they are rather than incorporating or submitting them into an overly manufactured design process.

What are your concerns with design and the products that you create?

We don’t have a manifesto, I am not sure if we really believe in manifestos. People and design are ever changing. To write those sorts of things down seems somewhat arrogant. What we really are concerned with is that the work we do is thoughtful and custom-made to each project’s specific needs. We are concerned with thinking and producing the project’s idea in the simplest way and whether it communicates to the people it needs to. Every project we work on is different and requires something different from us each time. That is what makes our life exciting and fills the project with energy.

What are your ideas about changing an environment with your products/projects?

Sometimes we feel our environments could be more pleasant by adding a little humour or highlighting something that people may miss or walk past without noticing. Slightly altering or adding something could change it altogether, transforming it from a rather boring, suppressive environment into more of a pleasurable, interesting one.

Your Urban Conservatory project brings nature back into an urban environment - can you explain this idea further?

The Urban Conservatory project was about being able to apply a bit of nature indoors, in particular to a flat (home) in the town or city. The city doesn’t want to allow us much room to see life grow. Being able to enjoy your own bit of nature - whether a lawn, a scraggy bush, a flowerbed or window box - means a lot. Plants grow, die and are bought again. To save time and money, we created 1:1 scale plant products (stickers, posters and tapes) that we can have and use to change the interior of the home or office. These urban conservatory print products add nature/a bit of greenery to ordinary furniture, walls, doors etc, almost making them alive!

How did the project develop?

We won this year’s Creative Futures and we were asked to do a window display at Selfridges Department store of our own work. The Urban Conservatory project was inspired and developed by a comment made by the Selfridges window display team - they told us ‘Don’t use anything that cannot stand the heat, even in winter the windows get very hot, it’s like a conservatory’. We really liked this idea of it being a conservatory right in the middle of Oxford Street, so we took them literally. If we had just made it a real conservatory though, the project could not go beyond Selfridges. People find real plants hard to grow - always too busy to remember to water them. So we decided to use the production budget to create printed matter plants.

How do people respond to your products?

They think they’re great, people use them just as we hoped - I all sorts of ways. The Ivy tape for example we used to hold some furniture we built for the studio. Emma’s mum uses hers on her Christmas wrapping paper. However people choose to use it, it lets that plant grow and makes it more of an interesting, pleasurable object or place to be.

How did the idea come about for the Grey Blanket project?

The idea for the Grey Blanket came from numerous ideas, projects and discussions we had and specifically a few projects we did before the Grey Blanket. We were cycling across central London every day and were conscious of how polluted the city was. The project just accelerated from there - discussions about white vans with ‘clean me’ on, to Duchamp’s Dust built-up on the Large Glass. And an extract from a book we were reading called ‘Fragments of the European City’ by Stephen Barber. ‘… so that the faces incorporate the city as a surface of lines, textures, marks, scars. The dirt of the city rapidly builds upon the surface skin of the city’s inhabitants, and any face caught in static in the street will be encrusted with the expulsive languages of the city as pervasively as is the surface of the city’s buildings.’

We began to be more aware of what the city would actually look like when you cleaned the grey dirt off the surfaces of all the buildings. We wanted to transform a public space to raise awareness of what people take for granted and to disrupt the grey monotonous routine of our city. We were aware we were not defacing, damaging or harming the city, only using the urban process of pollution, to draw attention to itself as though the city itself created the works.

‘4m long typographic messages, rubbed out of pollution build-up, raise awareness of what we breathe in everyday, on every journey around London. Created by cleaning off areas of carbon emissions built up on surfaces around the city, they reveal buildings, walls, and tiles which have been hidden for years under the grey blanket of pollution. Find them across London from Hyde Park Corner underpass to Tower Bridge Road, before the city is completely cleaned up, or enough pollutants build up again for the message to vanish.’ - Our press release.

What response did you get back? Did it raise awareness do you think?

The best thing about doing this project (something we never anticipated) is we actually got the council into action and they began to clean the buildings, underpasses and walls we had been rubbing away at. It did stop the public seeing the message, but that didn’t matter because it meant we were actually making a difference. We created an awareness which directly got the councils to clean their borough, which has in a small way helped London to be a better, more pleasurable place to live in. Once they had seen our (clean) graffiti, they had to clean it off. The ones they did leave, the public would see and be more aware of what they are breathing and what lies beneath London’s buildings.

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