Make, Do, and Mend, 2025
Graphic design is often described as a problem-solving mechanism. This notion is most plausible when the problems at hand are matters of corporate communication and commercial production. But as graphic designers’ work reaches further beyond the logic of capitalism and consumption, the clarity of its potential to solve problems wanes. That might be because graphic design is inherently superficial.
Graphic designers work with surfaces: the page, the poster, the screen, the spread. Rather than transform the thing, graphic designers transform the image, the impression, of the thing. It follows that the language of problem-solving no longer feels adequate when the problems at hand go deeper than the surface. When graphic designers create aesthetic responses to social or material problems, the superficiality of the practice becomes conspicuous.
Aware of this mismatch, the designer has a choice: to disengage and become apathetic about design’s role, or to don the hats of other professions to compensate for the perceived lack of depth. Perhaps there is another option: a way of approaching graphic design as a socially-engaged practice while remaining honest about its constraints. To learn how to make meaning and facilitate change through surface-level interventions, graphic designers might engage with another superficial craft to find practical analogues.
One such craft is textile mending. Mending breaks with the notion that all interventions are necessitated by “problems.” Reasons for mending might be negative: gaps, holes, tears. But some mends might attest to the functionality and continued use of a garment; others might be purely decorative.
A mend is local. It implies its own boundaries. A stitch on the cuff of a shirtsleeve doesn’t fundamentally change—nor claim to change—the garment. It is, instead, a small effort taken upon something broader than itself. It doesn’t claim to fix, only to repair. And a mend is only a single mark within a larger practice of maintenance. Mending signifies an engagement that doesn’t happen just once, as “solution” implies; rather, it is a series of efforts that continually re-engage the same material.
Mending is abundant with lessons for design practice, from the practical to the poetic. Mends can be invisible, made to go unnoticed to the untrained eye. They might be visible, made to draw attention to the intervention of repair or the memory of disrepair. As a practice born from material scarcity, mending encourages scrappiness and rejects novelty. This resourcefulness holds promise as both a material and conceptual approach, encouraging designers to glean form and content from their surroundings—to engage with existing structures rather than invent new ones.
Where to deny or disregard repair is to accept disrepair, mending means rejecting the inevitability of one’s conditions. Mending is a resistance to entropy, a continual pattern of confrontation to deterioration. It attends to holes as they form; it cares; it rejects neglect. And although mending begins at an individual level, methods of mending are communicative and collaborative by nature. At the core of the craft, the stitch symbolizes two parts merging together. Then, this combinatory relation echoes: mending creates opportunities to build social networks, the evidence of which we see in knitting groups and repair cafés.
Finally, mending is an intervention: an action upon material. A sense of personal agency thus ripples outward from the mending practice. Repairing a garment signifies taking matters into one’s own hands, taking back power from a system that encourages a seamless cycle of consumption and waste. The act of repair can then socially signal this resistance, reminding the viewer that his surroundings are not static, but plastic.
Mending suggests that graphic design interventions can be manifestations of individual volition that quietly shift our collective perception of power. The craft makes us aware of surfaces and their potential to be repaired, restored, or reckoned with. As designers, whose work is to shape how surfaces are read, we can use the mending approach to identify the surfaces where graphic design might engage. With mending as a conceptual scaffolding, we can adapt its methods to our own set of tools.
My thesis project is called Make, Do, and Mend. The title references Make Do and Mend, a British government pamphlet distributed to housewives in 1943 that contains instructions for mending textiles to conserve resources for the war effort. The punctuation I’ve added to the title is an acknowledgement of how graphic designers shape meaning. The commas transform the reference text from a command of wartime rationing into a call to action for graphic designers to commit to the small interventions that shape our world. The thesis project consists of a series of five site-specific graphic design works that I produced over the academic year, each of which corresponds to a method of mending.
Each work is a publication that interacts with a specific location, proposing a mend to that site. The publications do not aim to fix the massive systemic problems that these sites represent; rather, each traces an outline of a single effort on the surface of the site, gently suggesting its malleability.
The publication takes the form of a toolkit. The book unrolls to reveal five strategies for mending; each method is paralleled by text that outlines its definitions. Then, each pocket holds a process zine for the project that I’ve related to that method. The pocket format opens the book form, suggesting that its constituent pieces might be built upon, removed, shared, or generally made to hold new content and meaning. Throughout the book, the visual language merges mending and graphic design with dotted and dashed lines that dually evoke sewing patterns and design software.
Make Do and Mend suggests to the reader: “Always carry a needle and cotton and mending silk with you.” When we are perpetually armed with the tools to intervene, new opportunities for mending as a graphic intervention will surface.