Booze and Peruse...: 1st Designer

Lynne Maclachlan

Lynne MacLachlan is a jeweller and a designer from Scotland but is currently based in London and is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art and is now undertaking a PhD in the Design Group of the Open University, in the department of Innovation and Design, reaching the role of the generative design and digital fabrication and if that is not enough she is also a part time lecturer at the University for the Creative Arts.

Her interests lie in the use of Generative/Parametric Design for objects and architecture, her current research is primarily on the application of shape grammar. Lynne combines the latest digital technology with traditional craft techniques to produce captivating and innovative designs for jewellery and objects for the 21^st Century. She uses generative design – designing using computer programmes to generate different forms and structures which she then uses in her work.

Lynne has won many prizes for her work including Scottish International Education Trust Visual Art prize, a Dewar Arts Award and several prizes and commendations for her design work by the Goldsmiths Craft and Design Council. She has been shortlisted for the 'Argent Young Jeweller of the Year' and one of the 'EC One Unsigned' top ten jewellers. She has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, most recently with in the Crafts Council's touring exhibition Lab Craft and has participated in projects with Tiffany&Co and Swarovski.

When she began her research a few years ago in her BDes Jewellery degree she was surprised to find the complex ideas and ideals associated with ‘craft’. She broadly researched this topic from a range of reliable and valid references, what she realised from her research was the way she had been conducting her practice - that craft is a set of principles, a way of working or ones approach to the production of artefacts, as craft writer Glen Adamson also surports.

What Lynne loves about the making rather than the designing is the application of the tools and what they can do for her. She had been swayed into jewellery design by a visit to the workshop, excited by the equipment and the ‘goings on’ in the place. The first year of any jewellery course is much the same; she simply learned and practiced the basic techniques of metalwork – soldering, hammering, rolling etc. She embraced these and thought long and hard about how she could use them, manipulate them and combine them with new ways to create new objects.

This is what she loves doing - learning about techniques and tools and applying them. It is also what she admires in other designer’s work – the beautiful and elegant application of these basic techniques to solve a problem and create intriguing new artefacts.

It was natural for her to use the computer as part of her work as a jeweller. Having computers in her house from an early age and having done a first degree it meant the presence of a computer was to be cemented into her everyday life. The computer became her new ‘toolbox’... This idea is what allowed her to link the way she worked in the workshop and the way she could work with computers.

After finishing her degree and she headed to the Royal College of Art, her ideas had started to formulate in her mind. So for her final degree work at Duncan of Jordanstone she developed jewellery from repeating patterns abstracted from drawings of insects. These patterns had involved a lot of repetitive work on Adobe Illustrator – moving a shape around at a repeating angle and trying out different combinations of shapes and angles until arriving at something she liked. From her previous experience she knew that this was something that could be automated using a computer program. Around the same time researching around the internet she stumbled upon examples of generative art – first on the blog called ‘Generator X’. She appreciated not only the aesthetics of most of the work it exhibited but also, more importantly, the way the pieceshad been made.

The rationale behind the work towards the end of her Masters was looking at processes and the manipulation to create jewellery and objects. At the same time as she was doing this, she was also working on the more digitally influenced stuff. She was also very interested in the growing copper sulphate crystals and casting their forms but also trying to mimic such processes digitally. McCullough’s idea is that each programmed process of a computer is a tool to operate on various symbolic media. At the Royal College of Art she began to use programmes such as Jenn 3D (to generate polytopes) as her tools to create the forms she wanted to reference in nature.

It is also generally accepted that to make your own tool is a rite of passage for the crafts person. To Lynne this signified the route to true originality – and original tool for an original application. She started out using other peoples generative tools – but soon she began making her own unique tools. To do this you have to be skilled (skill is one of the cornerstones of craftsmanship) and you must have a deep understanding of what you are trying to model in a programme and also the language or platform you are using.

Initially Lynne thought using generative techniques would speed up her searches for pleasing compositions of the patterns she was making and take away the repetitive and time consuming work of producing them herself or by hand. However what excited her the most as she started to use them was the possibility to be surprised by some of the outcomes; despite setting up the rules sometime things were produced that one could not have fathomed.

She enjoys pushing the boundary for tools to the extreme, exploring all possibilities as a crafts person would, and so finding the ‘tipping points’ where things changed into completely different entities with different characteristic. She also appreciates and finds joy in the mistakes she makes; happy accidents and surprises were again what she loved about craft in this very material world we live in. Oversights in a code sometimes gave spectacular results that were sometime more pleasing.

Finally digital fabrication technology completed the reasons for using generative approaches. It allowed all these things to become tangible and material. The abstract and symbolic structures were brought back into the material world; the world of craft. To then exist or to undergo further traditional manual processes. This technology also carried with it its own set of processes, with its own set of constraints ready to be explored and harnessed.

To Lynne, generative design practices go hand in hand with craft – the application of processes and tools to fuel creativity. In her opinion this is (one of the ways) craft is going to endure and even flourish in design in the digital age.

She has recently grown an intense interest in tilings and tessellations (repeated shapes that fill a plane with no overlaps and no gaps), like those found in many of the Arabic patterns. Underlying these patterns are of course a lot of interesting geometry and even some unsolved mathematical questions. These patterns have been used in many cultures all over the world for many centuries.

Three dimensional tessellations also have strong links with the world of crystallography (the arrangement of crystals in a solid) - something she has long been fascinated with and has spent much of my masters at RCA trying to manipulate the growth of copper sulphate crystals and has focused large on ‘shape grammar’, a method of applying rules to transform shapes, which in turn lends itself to computer techniques and tessellation building them and then manipulating them to create forms and structures.

Her latest and most current structure exploration is that of the bubble. Using her digital techniques she has managed to create the structure of a cluster of bubbles and has developed a range of exquisite jewellery. She has combine the masculinity in its structure, yet so feminine in its fine asymmetrical line.