Making Do

LIKE IT OR NOT, the Cybertruck is the representative design object of our moment. Once described by the New York Times as “a culture war on wheels”—and that was before the election—the much-reviled, much-recalled vehicle is pure imposition rolling in the public streets, an adolescent fantasy made real, with all the associated irresponsibility that implies. In March, Tesla issued a general recall of its Cybertrucks because their stainless steel panels were falling off. A year earlier, some had been recalled due to faulty accelerator pedals that could become stuck, “caus[ing] the vehicle to accelerate unintentionally, increasing the risk of a crash,” according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In one respect, at least—as a symbol for present-day America—the vehicle really could not be improved. 

Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver saw it coming. In their 1972 book Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (republished by MIT Press in 2013), they offered a novel theory about how design changes over time. What begins in a flash of insight, often through the creative adaptation of existing systems, soon broadens outward into multiple ideas and expressions, like a river into a delta. Gradually this branching diversity is consolidated under the pressures of standardization and efficiency. “Towards the end of the series,” they wrote, typologies “stabilize in their most economic form and the object is no longer ad hoc.” This integrated state, while functionally and economically optimized, tends to be “blank and unresponsive,” as the spark of human ingenuity has been all but extinguished. At this stage in the process, the time is ripe for new disruption. 

As unified field theories of design go, this one is fairly convincing: It seems to hold equally well for skyscrapers, phones, sofas, and men’s clothing, and certainly for cars. Beginning, quite literally, as horseless carriages—familiar modes of transport with newfangled engines stuck on—automobiles were subjected to a decades-long process of intensive innovation. Solutions were found, regulations passed. Eventually the problem of making safe, fuel-efficient, consumer-friendly automobiles was more or less solved. Streamlining, originally introduced in a heroically optimistic idiom expressive of the futuristic promise of the machine age, gradually devolved into the bland, rounded-off sameness we see on every highway, parked along every curb. The Cybertruck is to this design consensus what the current political regime is to liberal democracy: an attempt to demolish the status quo, with nothing to offer in its place but aggression and regression. 

Despite being a half century old, Adhocism is a useful road map to this parlous present. What remain enduringly relevant are the book’s insights into the nature of design innovation, which Jencks described as analogous to biological evolution, a constant flow of emergent, divergent, and convergent streams. Previously, the orthodox view of creativity in design—initially codified at the Bauhaus, then propagated internationally—emphasized deductive problem-solving and inductive form-giving, the former based on given constraints, the latter on the inherent properties of materials. Jencks and Silver, though they had trained as modernists, rejected this rationalist point of view, advocating “a general and loose approach to a problem rather than a tight and systematic one.” Good design, they argued, can be like a good joke. It involves an unexpected collision of logics, a configuration of disparate materials rather than something made from scratch. Their title—ad hoc means “for this” in Latin—further emphasized a preoccupation with immediate context. Effectively, they brought design theory into the tradition of American pragmatism, framing it as an open-ended inquiry, subject to constant revision and reinvention.

Adhocism is broken into two parts: an extended manifesto by Jencks, followed by a series of more practical case studies by Silver.¹ The book is ambitiously eclectic in its examples throughout, traversing a spectrum from “hippie consumer tactics [to] the space program.” The cover features a dining chair that Silver made for his own brick-floored dining room in 1968 using lengths of gas pipe, wheels taken off a wheelchair, bicycle handles, insulation foam, and a chromed tractor seat. It’s a clever, Pop-inflected object, with a silhouette a little reminiscent of Mickey Mouse; Jencks described it as a “happy accident.” As an exemplar of adhocism, however, the authors presented the chair as akin to what people make in disaster zones and refugee encampments—anywhere they are reduced to their own wits and whatever lies to hand.

From this perspective, the antithesis of a Cybertruck would not be the latest banal sedan out of Detroit but, say, a Cuban máquina. The word simply means “machine,” but in slang it refers to American cars, many of them from the 1950s and 1960s, which still circulate on the island nation. To keep them running for decades is no easy task. Parts salvaged from many vehicles may be cobbled together into one that actually works. I’ve read of a Havana mechanic named Oscar Rodríguez who chopped a 1954 Jeep in half to extend its length, then put in a Jetta engine, a Hyundai transmission, and a steering column from a Soviet Volga, finishing it with custom bodywork and paint. A crafty self-taught designer like Rodríguez is making do within a limping, socialist economy, suppressed by both a repressive regime and punitive US sanctions; yet he’s expressing his individualism in true form, rather than as dystopian cosplay. 

Good design can be like a good joke. It involves an unexpected collision of logics, a configuration of disparate materials rather than something made from scratch.

In 2018, inspired by this culture of bricolage, curator Danni Friedman and designer Jean Lee gathered a group of designers in Havana for a ten-day workshop, turning them loose in an old shipyard factory filled with clay, concrete mix, scrap metal, and assorted junk. They eventually produced an exhibition (at Alcova Miami in December 2024), calling it “Invento Spirit” after the Cuban term for such “forced creativity.” Walking through the show was a lot like paging through Adhocism. The designers had come up with all sorts of objects—furniture, jewelry, lighting, even a coop for the chickens roaming the factory—each one more touchingly awkward than the next, that collectively offered, in Lee’s words, “a counterbalance to the excess of the contemporary Western design world.” 

These days, you may have to go to Cuba for such a utopian sentiment to ring true. But when Jencks and Silver were writing, many Americans had similar hopes for self-reliant DIY. It was the time of the Whole Earth Catalog (1968–72) and James Hennessey and Victor Papanek’s 1973 Nomadic Furniture, those well-known guidebooks to circumventing consumerism. Papanek was fascinated by technical innovations—design “that is easy to make, but which also folds, stacks, inflates or knocks down or else is disposable while being ecologically responsible”—though he advised his readers that usually, the best thing to do was scavenge old furniture and fix it up. Such recycling was indeed widespread in the counterculture; Jencks and Silver mention, as one example, the adoption of military uniforms as an ironic fashion statement. They viewed such appropriation as a symbolic technique of the weak against the strong, going so far as to characterize the early stages of political revolution—when disparate communities take to the streets without a clear common purpose—as the quintessence of adhocism in action.

By the 1980s, as it became apparent that capitalism would not oblige its critics by going away, the grassroots idealism attached to adhocism began to wane. As a formal and conceptual tactic, it remained important within the design avant-garde, but its connotations became more sardonic, even nihilistic. A prominent example from 1981, Mobile Infinito—a project of the Italian Radical group Studio Alchimia, masterminded by designer-editor Alessandro Mendini—incorporated elements by many different designers, each unaware of what the others would contribute. It was the old Surrealist game of cadavre exquis, exhumed just in time for the death of the author. This was bricolage in the mode of postmodernism, to use a term that Jencks had a leading role in propagating, defining it in multiple competing and overlapping (some would say maddening) ways. His interests definitely migrated away from the ramshackle cleverness of the street and toward high-concept critique; yet he himself saw continuities between the phases of his writing. In fact, his improvisatory, playful articulation of postmodernism could itself be considered an ad hoc exercise, applied in the arena of symbolic language rather than that of practical assembly.  

Ad hoc design practice largely followed suit. The Creative Salvage movement in London, led by figures like Ron Arad and Tom Dixon, involved a lot of bricolage (and a lot of old-fashioned metal bashing), but like the post-punk music scene with which it was allied, or Blade Runner (1982), the postmodern film par excellence whose art direction it strongly resembled, it was a highly self-conscious performance of urgency. The same can be said for Droog, the Netherlands-based collective that briefly set the agenda for design in the early 1990s. They took the comic one-liner very seriously; droog means “dry” in Dutch, and it was through deadpan humor that their designs achieved much of their effect. One of the group’s signature objects, Marcel Wanders’s Knotted Chair, 1996, was a joke about earnest hippie handcraft; it is made of epoxy-stiffened macramé. Tejo Remy made his Rag Chair and You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory chest of drawers, both 1991, by belting together remnant textiles and spare cabinet drawers, respectively. Instantly famous in design circles, both had been part of Remy’s graduation show in Utrecht, inspired by the story of Robinson Crusoe.² The designer imagined himself as the survivor of a shipwreck, picking through the flotsam of consumer society. The works were notional pastiches of real-world desperation. 

Jencks and Silver, to their credit, had resisted making a cargo cult of improvisation in this way, noting that “scavenged environments can have a breathtaking beauty, but the adhocism of poverty . . . has no romantic attraction for those that are forced to suffer it.” That note of concern has resonated ever more loudly as observers deepened their exploration of adaptive design, made in conditions of actual exigency. Photographer Michael Wolf’s Sitting in China (2002), a pictorial survey of what he called “bastard chairs,” quickly thrown together from miscellaneous materials, typifies the genre. His images are aesthetically striking, but are they ethically sound? Wolf himself seemed to wonder, describing the shame that people felt when their spontaneous ingenuity was seized upon by a camera-wielding foreigner: “Sometimes, a photographed chair was immediately confiscated: having lost its anonymity by being singled out as a noteworthy object, it rather became an object of embarrassment, too shoddy to ever be photographed again.” 

More recently, in 2023, Marta Gallery in Los Angeles presented an exhibition, “Make-Do,” that staged a similar condition of viewing. Half the chairs on display were made by contemporary designers, working with found materials within an imposed three-day time limit. The others were anonymous ad hoc chairs from the mid-nineteenth century to the present from the collection of auctioneer Avi Kovacevich, who had been inspired by Wolf’s project in China. The exhibition dared you to admire it all, staging a purposefully uncomfortable juxtaposition between drastically unequal forms of authorship: on the one hand, the freewheeling, lighthearted experimentation of up-and-coming design stars; on the other, the relics of people who quite possibly had been too poor to buy furniture.

“Make-Do” foregrounded a central quandary of adhocism: Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it is also the child of impoverishment. It’s easy to aestheticize the ingenuity of the street, harder to resolve the complex ideological issues that result. Perhaps inevitably, the designers who have confronted this issue most deeply are themselves from the Global South: the brothers Humberto and Fernando Campana. Their Favela Chair, 1991, later editioned by Edra, is composed of scraps of pine, initially sourced from supermarket fruit boxes, quickly nailed together in conscious approximation of Brazil’s infamous slums. “People in the favelas, they kind of fill it up, the space, with wood, plastic, without any rational thinking. But very intuitive,” Fernando Campana later remarked. “So I tried to have the same behavior as those people, in order to make that chair.”³ This act of ventriloquism, so much more painfully proximate than Remy’s self-identification with Crusoe, proved immediately influential and lastingly controversial. In her 2013 book Favelization, design historian Adriana Kertzer critiques the way that the Campanas and other Brazilian cultural producers “engage with primitivism and stereotype to make their goods more desirable to a non-Brazilian audience.”⁴ This was certainly not the Campanas’ intention, though Humberto himself admits that when they initially designed the chair, “we didn’t know the reality of the favela—we had faraway eyes.”⁵ 

That has since changed. Even as they rose to prominence as international design stars (a process that itself involved no little stereotyping of their work), the Campanas were conducting deep research into their country’s vernacular crafts, including caning, leatherwork, weaving, and wickerwork. They often took inspiration from the concept of gambiarra, defined by the artist Vik Muniz in a 2008 interview with the designers as “an unlikely mend, an unthinkable coupling, a solution so raw and transparent that it illustrates the problem at hand instead of eliminating it.”⁶ Rather than operating at a distance, or from behind a camera, the brothers engaged directly with makers, instrumentalizing their own design ideas to bring new resources to those communities. Through the Instituto Campana, which they founded in 2009, they began working in both remote regions of Brazil and urban neighborhoods, using design as a means of outreach and activating artisanal traditions with an eye toward cultural preservation. “My biggest concern when I am launching a project,” Humberto has said, “is to maintain self-esteem by humanizing the production process and safeguarding endangered traditions.”⁷

This principle of mutuality, arguably, is what has restored adhocism’s radical potential, even if the method is often interpreted as a showcase for personal inventiveness, decoupled from any broader social context. This is how the artists Tim Parsons and Jessica Charlesworth interpreted the idea for an exhibition inspired by Jencks and Silver’s book, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2011, for which they made a roomful of furniture using materials from the museum’s art handling and facilities departments. Similar projects from the design world include Martino Gamper’s influential “100 Chairs in 100 Days,” 2006–2007, an impressive feat of rapid-fire DIY involving a quarry of used and spare furniture parts; Max Lamb’s “Scrap Poly,” begun in 2010, assembled from pieces of expanded polystyrene that had accumulated in his studio; and Stephen Burks’s Covid-era project Shelter in Place, for which he and his partner Malika Leiper recrafted their own living environment, embedding their flat-screen TV, for example, in a woven fuselage incorporating empty cereal boxes, aluminum cans, and plastic packaging. “I hadn’t realized that being stripped bare of the pretensions and pressures of success could be generative,” Burks commented (and if there were ever a time that ad hoc design solutions became mainstream, the pandemic was it).⁸

The most compelling examples of adhocism, however, transcend the parameters of individual creativity. Burks’s approach exemplifies this: He has spent much of his career establishing long-lasting relationships with global artisan communities, allowing possibilities to arise organically from the exchange. This kind of improvisation within the marketplace is what distinguishes adhocism from neo-Dadaist collage and sculpture in the tradition of the assisted readymade. It is, in the end, design:a means of engaging with the messy, unsatisfactory world and trying to make it a little better. Exemplary in this respect are Nifemi Marcus-Bello, who is based in Lagos, and the partnership of Dushyant Bansal and Priyanka Sharma, who operate as Studio Raw Material in Makrana, a town in Rajasthan that is to India roughly what Carrara is to Italy. 

Marcus-Bello works primarily with aluminum and copper, which enter Nigeria in the form of used engine blocks and electronic waste. Typically the metals are melted down at independent foundries and recast into salable commodities, like manhole covers and replacement car parts. Inspired by these artisanal interventions into the commodity chain, Marcus-Bello collaborates with foundry workers to create elegant furniture that he charges with symbolism drawn from oríkì, the traditional praise poetry of the Yoruba. He sometimes casts the fingerprints of his collaborators (as well as his own) in clay and applies them to his work as a kind of ornament. It’s a reminder that under the metal’s gleam is not just high craft, but also hard graft.  

Similarly, Studio Raw Material works with discards from the quarries of Makrana, where nearly twenty million tons of stone are processed annually. Like Marcus-Bello, Bansal and Sharma work with artisans recruited from the local industry, making objects that exemplify the Hindi concept of jugaad (the term can be set alongside the Cuban invento and the Portuguese gambiarra, again referring to resourceful problem-solving). In true ad hoc fashion, they develop their asymmetrical compositions in response to the fragments, joining them together with homemade adhesive—a compound of marble dust and natural resin, adapted from a traditional recipe—and then selectively polish the stone, bringing out its color and figure. Some areas are left unfinished, scraped and gouged from the force of their extraction from the earth.

The big question, of course, is whether such beautiful small-scale experiments can hope to offer an alternative to what we might call Cybertruckism. This may seem like wishful thinking; we are undeniably going through a time of massive disruption, but at the moment, that is a top-down process. Even so, there are a few reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for grassroots adhocism. First, as Jencks never tired of pointing out, pluralism is the only true majority politics. The one thing that can be said of most people is that they are different from one another; in the long run, a design culture that is genuinely diverse, rather than trained on separate demographics as if they were sighted targets, may well win out. Second, as the makers of many a Mad Max movie have intuited, we might be entering a time of “forced creativity” whether we like it or not. Climate change and concomitant resource scarcity will make localized, adaptive reuse gradually more economically viable, maybe even unavoidable. Jencks and Silver’s normative pathway of design typologies may be thrown into reverse gear as universal formulas disaggregate into countless bespoke fixes.