CliffShoes. I wanted to make shoes. The plan was a 3d printed midsole out of something sustainable and then build the rest around that. I was kind of obsessed with it, honestly. I'd been thinking about it before the lab even started. I had references, material ideas, a whole thing. I was excited about it.

002

MaiaWeaving. I wanted to weave. I signed up for the four-week intro at the textile workshop, the one where you go once a week. And I did the whole thing. I learned how the loom works, I had ideas, I was sketching patterns out. Then somewhere near the end of the four weeks someone basically mentioned in passing that the textile department students have priority on the looms, and that as a graphic design student I wasn't really going to get loom time after the intro. So I'd just done a whole month of learning a thing I couldn't actually do.

004

MaiaRight, it should be. And the soft promises only started after the intro was already done. That was the real problem. By the time anyone said "maybe we can find you time, maybe between classes," I'd already put in the four weeks. So instead of cleanly cutting my losses and pivoting, I kept being half-promised. It dragged on. Eventually it became clear I just wasn't going to weave. I'd lost a real chunk of the semester to it by then and I had nothing to show for it except a few sketches and a vocabulary I couldn't use.

006

CliffAnd the worst part is that's not really anyone in particular's fault. Nobody was being mean to you. The system just doesn't have a clear answer for graphic design students who want to do material work, so the answer kind of gets improvised by whoever's standing in front of you that day.

007

CliffThe textile workshop has a weaver, a clothes-making person, and a knitter. That's the offer. Footwear isn't supported at all. Not the equipment, not the expertise, not even an obvious person to ask. And footwear is, like, a giant part of fashion. Honestly half the people I know who care about fashion care about it through shoes. I called around outside school to see if I could outsource the parts I couldn't make here, and every place was either too expensive to justify, too far, or wanted me to fit into their schedule like I was doing them a favor by showing up. The textile workshop is not a fashion workshop, and the school doesn't say so out loud.

010

CliffIt's not that I think the textile workshop should be a shoemaking workshop. It's that I think they should say, out loud and at the start, that footwear isn't really doable here. That would have saved me weeks. I would have made a different project. I would have made it.

011

MaiaRight. And that's basically the same thing that happened to me with weaving, just with different equipment in the way. The information that would have changed my whole semester was sitting somewhere in someone's head, and nobody told me until I was already deep in.

012

MaiaI'm not trying to be deflective about it. I could have asked more questions earlier. I could have been the kind of person who walks into the workshop on day one and asks a long, annoying list of practical questions before signing up for anything. But the workshop is supposed to be where the questions get answered, and instead it was where the no came from. After it was too late to use the no.

013

CliffAnd I think there's something specific about being a graphic design student here too. We're sort of expected to want to work on print, and when we want to work with our hands in any other medium the rest of the school treats it as a kind of detour. Meanwhile we are constantly expected to by our department. The infrastructure for material work is sized for the textile and fashion department, the fine arts department, that kind of material-first department, and we're squeezing into whatever gaps they leave.

014

MaiaYeah. The lab itself is supposed to be the place where graphic design students get to do that material work, but the lab leans on workshops that aren't actually set up for us in equal measure. So the lab makes a promise the school can't fully keep.

015

CliffThat's a good way to put it. The lab is honest about its intentions and the school isn't honest about its limits.

016

CliffI went into avoidance mode pretty hard. I was still showing up most of the time, that part I want to be accurate about. I wasn't disappearing entirely. But on the days I came in I wasn't really making progress, and I did miss a fair bit of class, more than I'd like to admit. So it wasn't absence exactly. It was being there without being there. The weeks where I was technically present but doing nothing blur together in my memory.

018

CliffAnd on top of that the graphic design curriculum was already grinding me down. I came into this lab already running on fumes. The shoes thing collapsing was sort of the last straw that turned the burnout into actual not-showing-up.

019

MaiaSame. The graphic design course load this semester was a lot. I had stuff going on outside school too, life stuff, that was pulling on me. So when the weaving fell apart it didn't land in a vacuum. It landed on top of a stack of other things that were already wobbly.

020

CliffHere's the part I want to be honest about. I think I used the external problem as cover for internal stuff. The shoes not being possible was real. But the avoidance after that wasn't only because of the shoes. I think I'm someone who, when something gets hard, finds a reason to not be in the room. The shoes gave me a particularly clean reason. And I leaned on it for longer than I should have.

021

MaiaI relate to that more than I'd like to. I think a lot of my "trying to make weaving work" period was me waiting for someone else to give me permission to give up. Instead of just deciding myself that it wasn't going to work and pivoting. I let the soft promises keep me hopeful for too long because hopeful was easier than starting over.

022

MaiaBad. I felt bad about coming in, I felt bad about not coming in. I'd come in with the intention of making something happen and then I'd just sort of sit there with my notebook open and not write anything in it. The room itself wasn't the problem. The problem was that I didn't know what I was doing there anymore, and being seen not knowing felt worse than just not being seen at all.

024

CliffI have this thing where I just don't do well in groups in general. One on one I'm fine, I can sit with anyone for hours and actually talk. In a group setting something closes down in me. I get quiet, I want to be invisible. So even on days when I had something I could have worked on, the group format of the lab was a thing I'd dread before getting on my bike to school.

025

CliffWhich is also partly on me, by the way. The lab isn't responsible for me being shy. I want to make sure I name that.

026

MaiaYeah, but the lab format does assume a certain kind of person flourishes in it. The kind of person who likes thinking out loud in front of others, who shares progress easily. We've both said we're more one-on-one people. There's a version of the IST that would have worked better for both of us, and a version of us that would have worked better for the IST. Both of those versions exist, and what we got is what we got.

027

CliffThat's fair. I don't want to make it sound like the school did this to us and we were just passengers. We made choices. I chose to keep showing up but not really do anything for stretches at a time, which is a different kind of choosing but it's still a choice. Nobody else made it for me.

028

MaiaThe knitting intro is the answer, basically. We both showed up at the knitting workshop intro kind of as a last resort, and it was a coincidence we were there at the same time. We'd talked vaguely before about doing clothes together at some point in some imagined future. In that workshop it just kind of clicked that the imagined future was now, because neither of us had a process going.

030

CliffAnd then we landed on jeans pretty quickly.

031

MaiaYeah, almost embarrassingly fast. I think it was the first thing we said and we just stuck with it. It felt like we both needed something concrete to commit to, and the first concrete thing was good enough.

032

MaiaIt got me back in the building. That alone. I don't think I would have restarted anything on my own at that point in the semester. Working with one specific person who I already knew and trusted took the social weight out of it. It wasn't a group, it wasn't a performance. Just two people with nothing to lose deciding to make something anyway. That lowered the stakes in a way I really needed.

034

CliffSame answer, basically. Lighter immediately. The project stopped being this private thing I was hauling around. When I was stuck you'd keep going, when you were stuck I would. That rhythm is the only reason I have anything to show.

036

CliffThe harder part was that I had to slow down a bit. Joint process means every fork is a small negotiation. I had to check in on choices I'd usually just make. That's healthy, probably. Annoying sometimes, also. And I think we made some compromise decisions that neither of us would have made alone, which is kind of what collaboration is, but it's worth naming.

037

MaiaYeah. And honestly, I worry sometimes that we used each other as a way to avoid the harder solo work. Like, the collaboration was real and good, but a piece of it was also two people clinging to the nearest available raft. I don't think that invalidates what we made. I think it's worth being honest that the collaboration came partly out of mutual rescue.

038

CliffThat's a hard thing to say but yeah. Me too. I'd rather have done a real solo project than a collaboration that grew out of failure. But I'd rather have a collaboration that grew out of failure than nothing, which was the actual alternative.

039

MaiaKnitting. So much more knitting. By the time I got into knitting properly I was running out of weeks. There was a version of this semester where I had two months of knitting at the end, where I could have actually built something. The four-week intro was barely enough to learn the basics. I was just starting to feel comfortable on the machine when the deadline showed up.

041

MaiaIf I'd known from week one that weaving wasn't available to me, I would have started knitting in week one. That's like ten more weeks. Ten more weeks is a different project. Probably a different person at the end of it too.

042

MaiaFinished pieces. A series. Not just samples and tests. I'd have a coherent body of work in knit, with a developed pattern language that actually means something. I had a vision of working with the knitting machine to do graphic-design-style patterns, which is sort of a natural fit for someone coming from where I'm coming from. With more time I'd have explored that properly. Made finished garments out of it.

044

MaiaAnd honestly, I'd have learned the machine well enough to make my own decisions, instead of constantly asking the workshop people if what I wanted was possible. I was always one step behind the equipment.

045

CliffGod, yeah. I think about that a lot for you. The version of you with three months of knitting versus the version with four weeks. It's a different person making different things.

046

CliffIf I'd known on day one that the school couldn't support shoes, I'd have either started outsourcing properly with real time to negotiate, or I'd have switched the project earlier and probably ended the semester with assembled jeans instead of a cut pattern.

048

CliffWith actual time to outsource the shoe stuff, I think I'd have made one finished prototype. The goal was never a pair, never a range. One shoe with a 3d printed midsole that I could actually wear. That was the whole brief from day one.

049

CliffAnd honestly, if I had time and the school had the equipment, I think the shoes would still have been the right project. I haven't let go of it. I just couldn't do it here, this semester, with what was available.

050

CliffProbably not, honestly. The collaboration came out of both of us being broken. If we'd both been on track we'd have nodded at each other in the hallway and that would have been it. Which is kind of bleak when I say it like that.

052

MaiaIt is and it isn't. I think it's bleak in the sense that we wouldn't have found the thing that ended up being the most generative part of our semester. But it's also fine, because if we'd both been on track we'd have made the things we actually wanted to make. The collaboration is a beautiful consolation prize, but it's still a consolation prize.

053

CliffI want to push back a little on that, actually. I don't think it's only a consolation prize. I think it taught me something about how I want to work in the future that the solo shoe project wouldn't have. Even in the better timeline I should have been collaborating somewhere. I just wouldn't have known to.

054

MaiaOkay, fair. So maybe in the better timeline we still find each other, just later, and on better terms. Less rescue, more choice.

055

CliffYeah. That's probably right.

056

MaiaAnd I want to say this too, because I keep thinking about it. More time isn't actually the only thing missing. It's also energy, and clearer information at the start, and some kind of mentorship for when a process stalls. Not just somebody noticing. Somebody who can give you an actual next step when you're stuck.

057

CliffThat's a really good point. The lab has check-ins built in but they're more about progress than about triage. And we both presented in those check-ins like we were maybe okay, because the social cost of saying "I have done literally nothing for three weeks" was higher than the social cost of nodding through it.

058

MaiaRight. We performed being fine. So even when someone could see we weren't fully fine, we were still working pretty hard at making it look manageable.

059

CliffA jeans pattern in CLO3D, which I learned from scratch this semester. Cut out in cheesecloth as practice, then cut out in denim. Not sewn. So I have flat denim jeans-pieces basically, ready to go but not assembled. Plus the knitting work we did along the way. That's the inventory.

061

CliffSome part of me is fine with that, some part of me isn't. I keep going back and forth on whether the unfinished thing counts as a finished thing in disguise. I don't fully know.

062

MaiaI'll tell you what I think. I think you're a little easy on yourself when you say sewing wouldn't have taught you anything new. I think it would have. Not the same kind of thing, sure, but the act of putting it together changes what the pattern is. Right now you have a plan. Sewn, you'd have a thing. Those are not the same.

063

CliffYeah. That's fair. I've been protecting myself a bit. I should sew them.

064

MaiaI have knitted pieces. I designed the pattern myself and then ran it on the knitting machine, so it's mine end to end. The pattern was the design work, the knitting was the production. I have several pieces from during the IST and I've been continuing after the resit deadline came up, so I have more now than I did when we technically failed. That's a weird sentence to say out loud.

066

MaiaPlus the shared jeans process, which is half mine and half yours.

067

MaiaYeah. I want to keep going. I want to develop the pattern language further, make actual finished garments, do a small series. The knitting machine kind of unlocked something for me. It's the first thing this year where I felt like the equipment and my brain agreed. I'm not letting that go just because the semester ended badly.

069

MaiaIf anything, it's almost funny that the IST formally ended and my work on the IST topic is still continuing. The grade and the process are not the same timeline.

070

CliffThat's actually maybe the thing I want to say loudest in this interview. The grade and the process are not the same timeline. We failed the IST and we both have work that the school doesn't know how to count, because some of it happened after the deadline and some of it is too unfinished to officially count. That doesn't mean the work isn't real.

071

MaiaRight. The IST is a four-month container for what is, for me at least, a multi-year interest. The container failed. The interest didn't, though.

072

MaiaI waited too long to give up on weaving. That's the big one. I should have written it off after week three of the intro, not let it drag on for six more weeks. I was being polite to a possibility that wasn't going to materialize, and the politeness cost me actual semester time.

074

MaiaI also didn't ask for help when I should have. Not from teachers, not from peers, not from anyone. I treated stalling as a private problem instead of something I could put on the table. I think I was embarrassed.

075

CliffSame. Both of those, exactly. I didn't ask for help either. I went silent. I kept thinking I'd come back into class with a plan, like I'd reappear with the project saved, and that fantasy of the dramatic comeback kept me from doing the smaller, less impressive thing of just emailing someone and asking for advice.

076

MaiaYeah, the dramatic comeback fantasy is a real thing. It's the enemy of just showing up.

077

CliffI also want to say, for me, that I have a pattern of using external obstacles as cover for internal ones. The shoes thing was real, but I leaned on it past the point where it was the actual problem. The actual problem was that I was burnt out and shy and not in the headspace to make work, and the shoes gave me a respectable reason to be those things.

078

CliffI want to catch that next time. The external thing being real doesn't mean it's the only thing happening.

079

MaiaI want to add one for me. I think I'm too quick to accept a role of the person things happen to, instead of the person who does things. Like, the textile dept priority thing happened to me, but my response to it could have been a lot more active a lot earlier. I let it be a thing I was a victim of for longer than was useful.

080

CliffThat's a good one. Different version of the same problem we both have.

081

MaiaAnd honestly, on the lab itself: we both got to the end of the semester with unfinished work and an okay-ish reflection, and we both got the failing grade we earned. I don't want to pretend the grade is wrong. I want to say the system didn't help us as much as it could have, and we also didn't fight it well enough.

082

Maia"Here is what is and isn't actually possible for a graphic design student." With a list. With names of who to ask. With the priority rules. With the equipment that exists and the equipment that doesn't. Just put it on the wall. Don't make me find out in week five.

084

CliffMine would be: footwear is not supported here, here are some real options if that's what you wanted. Don't pretend the textile workshop is a fashion workshop. Be specific.

085

MaiaAnd honestly, on the lab itself, I want to be fair to the teacher. She did notice. She checked in on us, she could see we weren't really making progress, that wasn't a blind spot. So it's not that nobody saw. The thing I'd want is the next layer down. Being seen stalled doesn't unstall you. There's something missing between "I see you're struggling" and "here's something specific that helps you get moving again." That's the gap I felt, not a lack of attention.

086

CliffAnd to be specific about who: I'd want this from the graphic design department itself, not from the lab. The lab is a downstream thing. The department is the one expecting us to make material work in the first place, so the department should be the one acknowledging that it's logistically harder than the syllabus implies, and offering some structural support around it. Not a removal of the requirement. A list of outsourcing partners maybe. Sample budgets. Realistic timelines. The lab can't fix what the department hasn't named.

087

MaiaAnd, honestly, more honesty about the bandwidth of the workshop staff. They are stretched. They can't be the personal mentor of every graphic design student who wants to do textiles. So some of what they could do, they can't do, and pretending otherwise sets us up for the soft promises problem.

088

CliffNone of this absolves us. It just makes a clearer picture of what we were working inside.

089

MaiaI'd say two students wanted to do specific material things. The school's infrastructure didn't actually support either of those things. Neither of us got told that early enough to recover. Both of us also had pre-existing burnout that the situation worsened, and both of us had personal patterns of avoidance and politeness that made things worse than they had to be.

091

MaiaWe ended up making something together at the end out of whatever we could still reach. We both have unfinished work that is real but hard for the school to count. And both of us are continuing past the formal end of the IST in our own ways, which I think tells you the work was actually meaningful, just not on the timeline the lab is built for.

092

MaiaIt's not a flattering arc, but it's the one we actually had.

093

CliffI'd say the lab is set up assuming material access is a given, and for our two projects it really wasn't. We both spent the first part of the semester learning that the thing we wanted to do wasn't actually on offer here, and the second part trying to grieve that and find something else. The way we found each other is the most generative thing that came out of either of our processes. The objects we made are partial. The collaboration is the real artifact.

095

CliffI'd also say we both have specific, fixable patterns. Mine is hiding when things get hard. Yours is being too patient with situations that aren't going to resolve. Both of those are things that look reasonable in the moment and cost a lot in retrospect. I don't want to walk away from this lab without naming them.

096

CliffThe school owes us a clearer picture of what's possible here, on day one, for graphic design students who want to do material work. It owes us better triage when a process stalls. It doesn't owe us a passing grade. We didn't earn one.

098

CliffBoth of those things can be true at the same time. We can fail the IST fairly and the school can still have failed us in some specific ways that were partly responsible for that fail.

099

MaiaCosigned.

100

MaiaI'm taking the knitting machine seriously. That's the obvious one. The less obvious one is that I'm not going to wait for an institution to give me permission to commit to something. If I'd just decided in week three that weaving wasn't going to happen and pivoted myself, I'd have had a different semester. Next time the soft promises are the signal to leave, not the signal to stay.

102

MaiaAlso, asking for help earlier. I keep saying it. I want it to actually become a habit and not a sentence I write in reflections.

103

CliffPlan B on day one. If a project needs specific equipment I'm going to find out in week one whether that equipment exists here. If it doesn't, I either switch or start outsourcing immediately, not in week six when the panic kicks in.

105

CliffShowing up even when I don't have a plan. The dramatic comeback fantasy has to die. Just being in the room is most of the work, even when the room is uncomfortable for me.

106

CliffAnd working with one person I trust as a default, not a backup. I worked the best I worked all semester next to you. That's a piece of information I'm going to use the next time someone asks me how I want to make something.

107

MaiaSame here. Both directions.

108