This year the British Council partnered with Design Night Festival, the biggest annual design festival held in Estonia. We wished to participate in the festival in a way that our participation would be useful for people and that would be interesting to see by wider audience. We found that best solution to achieve this would be to have a workshop. Therefore we invited Nick Rawcliffe (Rawstudio) and Adam Fearweather (Re-Worked) from UK to come over to help 14 Estonian design students to create new functional objects from old, useless and broken sports materials.

The event was held in the garden space of an old power plant. The plant, which will be developed into cultural and creative hub within a year, was a perfect e fit for the theme of our workshop as it presented an old space that will be turned into new usable space by Estonian creative minds.

As we did not know what kind of objects participants would be creating, we brought a big number of old and useless sports and hobby materials to the venue. Since the workshop was all about recycling and upcycling materials, we cooperated with Charity Shop and bicycle repair shop who gave us many things for the workshop that they did not use or need anymore.

It seemed that bicycle parts were the most inspiring elements for the participants because over the three days of the workshop participants designed and created many objects, such as lamps, hangers, shoes, mostly from old bicycles.

All the works that were created during the workshop were publicly exhibited during the Design Night Festival. After the exhibition, all the works were returned to their creators and two of them moved to their new home, Power Plant garden, where they remind people what can be created from junk.

Check out a video on the workshop on Vimeo

For more images of the workshop and the participant's creations, visit our flickr