Design is Happening
Nifemi Marcus-Bello in Lagos (image: Ọlájídé Ayni).
In their 2011 study of craft neighbourhoods in Istanbul, published in MIT Press’s Design Issues, Turkish designers Çiğdem Kaya and Burcu (Yançatarol) Yağiz observed how the “modes of production in informal economies are highly dependent on social relationships such as apprenticeship and vocational training.” Such encounters, the authors argued, between “designers and [craftspeople] can create a genuine blend of practice” that represents a new “‘designing’ typology”, and which speaks of empowerment and community learning. Design in this form is both useful and context-responsive, with urban centres providing limitless possibilities for inspiration and innovation.
Nifemi Marcus-Bello, a Lagos-based designer, works in the sort of creative space described by Kaya and Yağiz. The result is an embodied approach to design in which ideas about practice become concrete and emerge from a blend of interactions within Lagos’s non-Western framework. Marcus-Bello continually looks to his home city and the everyday encounters therein as inspiration for his practice, nmbello Studio, and its championing of research-led and site-responsive design products.
Rather than adopt the role of passive observers in the city, Marcus-Bello and his team bear witness, probe, and engage in meaningful exchanges with a variety of collaborators. Often this process takes the form of daily encounters with individuals who may lack the formal title of “designer” but whose design solutions are found in many facets of the city’s life. These individuals are innovators whose creations solve everyday problems in Lagos, responding to societal needs. Amongst the indigenous products of this kind that have become a focus for Marcus-Bello is the kwali (which translates to “box” in English from the Hausa language), a portable shop of sorts that sells gum, painkillers, cigarettes and snacks. A familiar sight weaving through Lagos traffic, the kwali is a shelving unit made from discarded cardboard and assembled with tape (yellow and black) – material choices that are affordable, sustainable, and functional enough to allow vendors to move through the streets easily, as well as being cost-effective to replace after wear and tear.
A fully-stocked kwali.
Though grounded in Lagos, Marcus-Bello’s investigation of the kwali and other designs of its ilk is now extending into learning from experiences he has had (or is soon to have) in three other cities across West Africa: Accra, Dakar and Abidjan. This approach is part of an ambitious ongoing research project, Africa – A Designer’s Utopia, in which nmbello Studio has foregrounded design and manufacturing by anonymous makers in African cities, whose work will inform indigenous contemporary design solutions and products of the future. Additionally, the project explores the functionality, aesthetics and materials of a range of products, all of which have been broken down to allow each element to be analysed. For nmbello Studio, 21st-century design is a practice through which designers apply their focus to address the world’s major problems – poverty, conflict, environmental degradation, scarcity of resources, and access to decent housing and healthcare.
In the future, nmbello Studio will create contemporary design objects that draw inspiration from already existing indigenous products. The kwali is one example, the meruwa another – a cart made from reclaimed wood and bicycle tyres, which is used to transport gallons of water. This manually operated vehicle circumnavigates traffic challenges in urban areas and, like the kwali, is cost-effective and efficient. An exhibition drawn from another project, Oríkì (Act I): Friction Ridge, recently opened at Marta, a gallery in Los Angeles, and showcases a series of bronze benches produced using the lost-wax technique in Benin City. The pieces bear the marks of their designer, makers, and the surrounding community’s fingerprints as an exploration of craft, belonging and identity. The show also features a soundscape of Marcus-Bello’s mother reading his oríkì, a form of spoken poetry praising the individual in the Yoruba language of West Africa which, according to Yoruba historian Samuel Johnson, expresses hopes for what a child will become.
As Marcus-Bello’s work demonstrates, and the conversation to follow explores, embodied design offers an examination of the “thinking” of design as a process of experience. One way to consider design is to focus on the nature of the thinking it involves. What is a design? How does it work? What is it good for? nmbello Studio and its many collaborators show how design thinking, research and products can be strikingly effective in solving complex problems, especially those that require imagination, creativity and innovation.
Nifemi Marcus-Bello, photographed in his studio in Lagos. A kwali is shown propped up on a chair.
Jareh Das When you sent me the brief for Africa – A Designer’s Utopia, it mentioned specific cities you were responding to: Lagos, Accra, Abidjan and Dakar. You began from a place of observing Lagos, but what did it mean to take that research perspective to cities that are very different, and where designers are responding in different ways to their specific challenges? Why did you want to connect this research across West Africa?
Nifemi Marcus-Bello Like you mentioned, I started by observation, which is one of the reasons I’m trying to focus on West Africa, and not just Lagos. I visited three out of those four cities and realised that a lot of the objects that exist in Lagos also exist there, even if their materiality may be different, their use case may be different, and even how people interact with them – the names they’re called and their pathways of distribution – may be different. So I knew that for the research to be as cohesive as possible, I had to consider all of these cities. We’ve only done Lagos for now, but we’re pacing ourselves.
Jareh I’m also hearing something that speaks about a way of dismantling borders. When you move across West Africa, there are colonially-constructed borders that have separated things out. You have Francophone countries spliced in between ex-English colonies, and also resistance within those territories. Design thinking becomes a way to move across borders, like you said, where you’re finding similarities. What you think may be a Lagos-specific design, you can then go to somewhere like Accra and see, “Oh, people are innovating in the same way, because they’re faced with the same problems.” In a highly urbanised area where infrastructure is compromised, creative solutions come in to fill the gaps. It’s interesting to observe how a design process begins to move across borders – it can become a sort of unifying language and response outside of geopolitical constructs.
Marcus-Bello sketching in his studio.
Nifemi I just got off a podcast with Alice [Rawsthorn] from Design Emergency [a podcast, Instagram page and book launched by Rawsthorn and curator Paola Antonelli, ed.] and she was asking me if it’s OK to generalise African design, or if West African design is [all] the same, or if Nigerian design is also separate from West African design. One thing that I mentioned to her, which I’ll mention again, is that the commonality from practising in West and East Africa which I see is that African design is very contextual to both material and people, and it is very considerate of people. One of the things that I’m looking forward to in the research is either justifying contextually this approach to materiality, or seeing that there’s been an evolution that has happened within these products. I’ll give you an example from a preliminary observation in Accra, where they actually use the kwali, but it’s made out of plywood. In Lagos, the kwali has evolved from being made out of plywood in the 90s, to now being made out of cardboard and Styrofoam. This is heavily contextual to globalisation – it has happened where products have been brought into Lagos, the packaging has been thrown out, and people are taking that discarded packaging to create objects that are of use. So I think you’re absolutely right – it’s only borders dividing us. I think it’s availability [of materials] that divides our design language, so to speak.
Jareh I’m thinking about the kwali – I didn’t know what it was called before our conversation, but I’ve bought chewing gum or Panadol from them. It’s something familiar, but which you may not have a name for because it’s just that thing somebody carries through traffic or the streets to sell goods from. I am curious as to how you go through this research process where you’re observing your environment and looking at certain things, then going on this explorative journey that leads you into a community of makers, of people selling, and an exchange system that also speaks about a community-led design process. You enter these communities and get into this question of the way that design travels through the city. What are the challenges?
“One way to consider design is to focus on the thinking it involves. What is a design? How does it work? What is it good for?”
Nifemi Before beginning the research, I started doing case studies of these objects. I sat down to ask myself, “Why?” Why am I spending so much time doing these case studies and documenting them? What’s the end goal? Who does it affect? Who are the beneficiaries? What does the future hold for this type of research? I realised very quickly that I was actually trying to figure out what “good design” was in Lagos. These were well-designed objects that people would walk past, not even noticing them, but which enhance their daily lives and enhance various stakeholders’ daily lives as well. Once I found that out, I started diving in. A lot of the participants and locals asked why I was documenting these things, and one of the things I had to do was sit down with some of the hawkers to educate them on why I was doing it. The people who create the kwali are contemporary craftspeople. Not to sound like a broken record, but there’s a cultural aspect of making, a cultural aspect of distribution, a cultural aspect of communicating ideas. For each kwali, it’s someone going to a maker to give them a design specification, and that maker makes that product against the design specification.
nmbello Studio’s The Introvert’s Chair, produced in Lagos with a steel form and raffia weave.
Jareh You mentioned an end goal. Is there a sense that you’re acknowledging the design process and learning from it? Is there a sense that you want to improve things? Is there a social aspect to it?
Nifemi I don’t think I want to improve anything. I want to learn, selfishly, but one of the things I realised is that I can’t do that on my own. So how do you create an open-source methodology and figure out how to create an archive that we can actually benefit from, and have other designers dive into if they want to learn about this type of design that’s happening on the continent of Africa? Most importantly, I wanted to figure out how we can educate young designers – or designers and institutions on the continent – about the type of contemporary design or production that is being done. Because a lot of times when I have conversations with young designers at university in major cities in Africa, they always ask questions like, “Who’s doing good design on the continent? And is anything really happening?” or, “Can you see what’s happening in Europe? Why can’t we be that?” I tell them that if they look around, there’s design happening. On every single doorstep someone’s creating something. It might not have the “design” label on it, but it’s going through the same design process that they would use to create an object. These objects already are, in my opinion, what good design is – or what good design should be – on the continent. The end goal would be to make sure that lots of people are able to participate in this research, and not just in West Africa. There’s talk of doing one version in Congo for the Lubumbashi Biennale, and there’s a bunch of artists and designers who we’re speaking with to share our methodology so they can carry it out. It’s something I’m really excited about and it’s bigger than any one person. I wouldn’t even say there’s a social aspect – I think it might be a human aspect to get it done, if we can, as a unit.
Jareh For Oríkì (Act I): Friction Ridge, you went back into traditional craft and history, looking at the Benin Bronzes [a series of bronze plaques, reliefs and sculptures that were violently looted by British troops from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897, and which are the subject of calls for repatriation to Nigeria from the various European and American institutions in which they are currently held, ed.] and craftsmanship that has been passed down from generation to generation. Could you expand on looking at the historical, but being in a contemporary space? Is going back to historic ways of making something that you want to explore more in the future? While a lot of people are very familiar with certain things in history, I don’t know if there’s so much of a connection to actually understanding the making process. Could you tell me about that and also about how loaded bronze is as a material, especially given the debates around repatriation of the Benin Bronzes?
The bronze Friction Ridge Bench, produced in Benin City.
Nifemi As a designer, and I’ve been saying this for a couple of years, there are so many questions that I need answers to. Sometimes when I gravitate towards a certain production or manufacturing technique, or a material, it’s because I have questions around them and don’t know what’s going to come out of it. Bronze has become this sacred thing where some people are scared to even touch it or make it contemporary. I understand why; I understand the politics around it. But I want to take a stab at it, because this is something that we should still be celebrating. It’s important to look at the past. If we’re not careful, the past will just die, and we won’t be able to continue telling our stories. As a Nigerian designer – or an African designer – I think it’s important to tap into these spaces to create objects. One of the things I found fascinating was the fear of interacting with this material. I actually had that too, because of the politics around it; I feel like colonisation did a number on me. But why should I be scared of using this material? Why has it become so heavily politicised? Why do these borders exist in our minds? There were a lot of mental barriers to break down. I remember meeting the artisans for the first time and speaking to them about what exactly I was trying to do. Even though these artisans still exist, they’re making products of the past and selling them to tourists. I wanted to figure out a way to introduce them, subtly, to design. I might not be the one to change a lot of things within their own practice, but I wanted to figure out how a knowledge exchange could happen. I wanted to learn about the process and dive into it, and doing is one of the fastest, or best, ways to learn. I hope that they were also learning from the exchange, to see what potential can come out of it. One of the aspects I always think about, even with this research and approaching these types of materials, is that it’s like an informal design-policy integration in the sense that contemporary design thinking is put into craftsmanship – that knowledge is put into that space. If, for example, they’re then looking for work, they can say, “Hey, if we find a designer, we can probably create something new.” Or they can be designers themselves, because they are already designers in their own right. I’m still learning. I’ve had to because of the mindsets through which I learned design, but it’s about breaking down those barriers to navigate those spaces differently.
“If you look around, there’s design happening. On every doorstep someone’s creating something. It might not have the ‘design’ label on it, but it’s going through the same design process.”
Jareh Oríkì (Act I): Friction Ridge has different layers. There’s a soundscape, for example, with your mother reading your oríkì. I imagine this very embodied experience of the work – you’re introducing sounds and the surfaces of the bronze bench are imprinted with the hand through the lost-wax casting process, referencing touch and mark-making. I’m somebody who is very much interested in performance and traces of the making process. I’m thinking of all of these elements creating an immersive performative object that becomes embodied, which is interesting because when you think of the Benin Bronzes, and the uses for these objects, they were very embodied. They were animated and performative in the culture.
Nifemi The mindset I had for most of late last year, especially after designing the M2 Shelf [a piece referencing 19th-century Igbo wooden sculptures made out of West African mahogany, ed.], was that I really didn’t want to separate arts and design in the European sense with this project. I feel like it’s always been a mash-up in the society I was brought up in. A bench that’s made in Abeokuta can probably look like an art piece you shouldn’t sit on, but if you do it’s comfortable. One of the reasons why I didn’t want to present the bench on its own was that I realised the combination of the two could tell a better story and enhance the object. With the handprints, the most important thing was to embed the craftsmen in the work, and figure out a way to sign off on our collaboration. The fingerprints on the benches are of me, of the craftsmen who made the mould in Lagos, of the guys who transported the mould, and of the people from the community who finished them off because we needed as many hands – or as many fingers – as possible. It was something where I realised, wow, the community, or at least the makers, will feel like they were part of this process. They will be well within their rights to see a bench and be like, “Oh, that’s my fingerprint.” With the soundscape, I was extremely nervous. During this project, the most important thing was that I needed comfort, so I used my mom’s voice – the comfort that I know. She speaks on the oríkì, on the words of affirmation I was brought up with, which were said to me every day. I felt like I wanted people who walked through the space and interacted with the benches to have that same feeling, knowing full well that, because it’s a white-cube space, they can’t really touch it. It was important to give that comfort to people as they walk through the space.
Close up of Friction Ridge Bench with visible finger impressions.
Jareh I’m getting this sense that as you’re moving into these exhibition spaces, there’s resistance. The works are put on this pedestal where there’s a level of exclusivity, of elevation, of being precious objects, but you’re negotiating and bringing them back to understanding that they are functional as well, and also giving people access to them. When you’ve gone through a research and thinking process that is so close to a community, to the street, and when you’ve taken that inspiration and configured it into an object that enters into a white-cube framing, there seems to be a lot of tension in trying to keep the work true to its origin. Jumping forward to imagine doing exploratory case studies all across the different cities for Africa – A Designer’s Utopia, how do you amalgamate these learnings and present them? How do you imagine sharing this research in a way that involves everyone and is accessible to everyone?
Nifemi One of the things that I’m toying with is democratising the experience of what exhibitions should or can be. For example, with this research happening on the streets of Lagos, I think it’s important to share the analysis and outputs with the contributors before it goes anywhere. We need to figure out a way to show it across Lagos so that the stakeholders can also experience what the outputs mean and experience the learnings. It’s something I’m passionate about. That’s not to say that they won’t also be in a white-cube space, but democratisation, and the sharing of our experience and learnings, is extremely important. How do we merge an exhibition and installation experience so that it’s interactive and people are learning from it? I’m not scared to explore it as an art experiment, because one thing I’m learning to love, and leaning towards, is the emotional aspect that art plays within communities. I think the research can also have an interesting artistic output, which is engaging and sparks the imagination of the community around it as well.
A meruwa photographed in Lagos. The design has become one of the focuses of Marcus-Bello’s ongoing research.
Jareh I’m quite excited about these different ways in which this project is not just one thing in terms of its output; there are different levels of dissemination as well. There was a statement you’ve previously made that I thought was interesting: at the grassroots level, design is, in most instances, unconsciously practised. Taking research back to the community that you’ve engaged with and sharing it is, I think, useful in terms of democratising the design process. The fact that there isn’t a formal framing of something as design, but that it is design in terms of what it’s doing and its purpose, is an interesting point. Design can be an unconscious process in the everyday. This is a flattening of the more academic idea of design where you have to go to school, you have to be trained, you have to read certain things, you have to understand things through a certain lens, with this idea that it is also practically, maybe unintentionally, identifying a limitation and thinking of ways to overcome that. Cities are highly urbanised areas – there are more people, more challenges – so people within them are responding in a certain way, but I don’t think that this idea is limited to cities. When you move out of major cities, you’re also identifying these vernacular designs, right?
Nifemi Yes, but I would say that I’m not as excited about those as I am about the ones I see in major cities – the reason being that I feel like a lot of the objects that exist in major cities are a juxtaposition of interacting with modern-day life and forcing themselves through those daily lives. For example, the kwali doesn’t have to exist, but it’s something that does exist and so people use it. That’s the aspect I find intriguing. When I go to Ijebu, water is being transported from one house to the other [by meruwa], which I find fascinating, but when I go to certain areas in Lagos the meruwa is transporting water from one hospital to the other. That hospital already has modernday technology, but it has to interact with the meruwa as well – and the meruwa does a good job of it. I find that interesting, which is one of the reasons why I’m trying to focus on urban areas, major cities, because I think that’s something that a lot of other cities in different continents don’t have that we do. One of the things with this research is that lots of these objects are already inspiring the work I do. I keep saying this, because I really want someone to give me the opportunity to carry it out, but if someone asked me to design a kiosk at Coachella, I would just design a kwali using the materials available and have someone strap it around their neck to walk around and sell stuff. For me, it’s that interaction that is intriguing.
Words Jareh Das
Photographs Ọlájídé Ayni
This article was originally published in Disegno #35. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.