Events


2026

5 June



March - April

Symposium: Material Response:  Shaping Sustainable Practices from Clay and Waste

Material Response - Expanding Periphery Materials in a research project collaboration with Sunken Studio and the University of Leeds  2025
22 August


13 September    GreenEconomy Networking Event 
Speaking about Periphery Materials 

Speaking about Periphery Materials at Sunken Studio Open Day  17-21 September
Exhibiting Periphery Materials research at Material Matters, London Design Festival2 October



22 October Attending Clay Conference: From Waste to Resource: Circular Economies For Construction Clay Spoil

Speaking at SAIL Creative Climate Conversations 2025 17-19 OctoberSelected for RDI Summer Sessions at Dartington Hall

Last Updated 05.03.26
Chris Crawford



Potter, designer and materials researcher based in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

Moving toward less extractive, lower carbon ways of designing, making and building things.

I believe that the most interesting work happens at the intersections—between art and science, craft and industry, design and engineering. 

Painting, researching, throwing, teaching, 3D printing - I am not interested in ‘staying in my lane’. 

I enjoy big challenging problems and fresh ideas.

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RDI Summer Session 2025 


Image Credit: Philip Vile , RDI Faculty

26.06.26

RDI Summer Session 2025, 1 year on
Squeak & Bubble 
Lets make the most of Skrap



This time 
This time last year I came across a short LinkedIn post by designer Tom Lloyd. The post was about the Royal Designers for Industry Summer Sessions: “intergenerational gatherings of RDIs and emerging designers, scientists and engineers to share, inspire and challenge”


At the time I was about half way through The Material Way (TMW) - a course for artists and designers curious about working with bio based and waste based materials. I felt a new sense of practice, and line of enquiry emerging that reminded me of when I first smashed together oil paints at college. The tug of curiosity was now pulling me along, the theme of ‘Squeak and Bubble - lets make the most of skrap’ resonated, as did the method the deliberate mixing of people, disciplines and experience, and so rather on a whim, I applied. 

And in October 2025 I was very lucky to find myself at Dartington Hall in Devon for a weekend surrounded by Designers, Artists, Researchers, Writers, Bakers, Makers, Futurist, Medics...for an eye opening, thought changing, mind bending, hard to describe, articulate or explain weekend - that continues to bounce around in my head.


On TMW I was introduced to the writing of Neri Oxman - in particular her essay The Age of Entanglement. The premise was that these fields we traditionally see as siloed and specialised - Art and Science, Design and Engineering - are in fact completely entangled - dependent on one another for generating creative energy and new ideas. 


Everything I read about the philosophy of the RDI Summer Sessions “A release from our practices for a few days in a deeply beautiful environment. A messy, un-linear, generous tangle of thoughts, actions, needs, messages.”
It felt like the right thing at the right time, it resonated with this new strand of curiosity I was feeling. 


Indeed it’s an experience that I keep reflecting on - its many layers and lasting impacts. Nearly a year later and I am still unpacking the ways it altered how I think and what it is that I think about.


The weekend made me believe - in a real tangible way - that there are other people interested in this entangled, cross-disciplinary, ‘messy’ way of working and seeing the world. Other people who want to bypass the small talk and get to the most existential, connective, uninhibited conversations about big ideas from the get go.


More and more I think about how the weekend was run, the activities we did, meals shared. What on the face of it may have appeared random - even haphazard - I now fully realise was the heavily considered creation of an environment, by the RDI faculty, which encouraged sharing, thinking, and acting without the inhibitions that so often prevent us from opening up - from being really known & knowing.  


It made me think about some reading I have done about community recently (Microsolidarity). How it is not just shared interests that bring people together (sometimes called a ‘scene’) - but shared objectives - which truly create connection, breakthrough inhibition and get us to the most rewarding forms of human interaction ..


…interactions where we can talk about the things that deep down we really want to…those thoughts that often get held behind the gates of “will this person think I'm weird?”  - can be freed when we work toward a shared goal in a process that quickly establishes that “weirdness” is really a shared human condition. We can get to the heart of things when the environment, context, activity and objective - they coalesce to set our shared messy weirdness, and open curiosity, as table stakes… 


This years session is now open for applications (till 9th July, 2026). The theme is “Entangle” - which perhaps you can tell - is something I am really into… - there will be the opportunity to explore this “openly, playfully and inventively to bring about change for the better - nourishment, sustenance, energy, vitality, inventiveness, alchemy, floating, release, health …or something else entirely.”


I hope that if any of the above resonates, that you apply, that you get the opportunity to go, and that you might get out of it - something like what I did - a lasting sense that I am not alone, and an understanding that finding likeminded people involves releasing inhibition and being your most unhinged, messy and curious self.










Links:

https://royaldesignersforindustry.org/


https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ageofentanglement/release/1


https://www.microsolidarity.cc/essays/background-and-introduction