Gemma Copeland

Migrants In Culture’s Open Studio is back: 4 June 2026! Get your free 🎟️ ticket 🔗 in our bio We’re so excited to share our latest Design Delights for social movements with you. In the afternoon, we will offer a design drop-in clinic for organisers, together with the amazing @gemcopeland from @commonknowledge.coop See you @pelican.house ✨ Credits: MIC Design works featured were produced for @migrants_rights_network @peopleseconomy @migrantsorganise and Project 17. Avara type font, by Raphaël Bastide, with the contribution of Wei Huang, Lucas Le Bihan, Walid Bouchouchi, Jérémy Landes. Distributed by velvetyne.fr. Inclusive sans by Olivia King.

Two weeks in the red Apple

Take me back to the commune pls. This was the best week @bid_obs celebrating 10 years of Evening Class 💙💛💙💛 Reminding me that transformation happens through our encounters with others. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have...

More good things! Running the first @materials.festival , socialist utopias at @theworldtransformed in Manchester, worker co-op gatherings, visits from @piperhaywood @rob_copeland @rbn_copeland @oliverzidler , workshops and lectures in Italy, Switzerland and Portugal, @glengallwharfgarden , assorted @pelican.house bits

Some good bits from this year... Incl moving into my own place, @commonknowledge.coop gathering in Sweden, PAF Summer University and Marseille

🌸 Only one week to go until @materials.festival ! 🌈 We're taking over the whole building @pelican.house with talks and discussions, workshops, stalls, collective art-making and open studios. There will be discussions on topics like how cultural workers can support social movements and what precarity means specifically for creative workers, alongside workshops on how to establish infrastructures (like cooperatives and solidarity networks) that facilitate collaboration and build power from below. There's also a big focus on collective joy: what different futures can we imagine and how do we get there? There will be lots of other fun things to do too: @some.small.things and @roxanne_jingco are going to be facilitating some collective art-making in the yard, we're providing lunch and afterwards there will be drinks and music (which everyone is welcome to join). It's next Saturday 7 June @pelican.house — only a few tickets still available! Shout out to co-organisers @_.o.bella.o._ @djrmcewen @rosalieschweiker and our @commonknowledge.coop @unit38_ @migrantsinculture fam 💖

Save the date: Portal 0I: Digital Ecosystems – A Common Practice Thursday, 24.04.2025, 6–7.30 pm Online Conversation with Gemma Copeland, Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou and Stefanie Wuschitz. Moderated by Daniela Brugger (in English) In the Portals event series, artist Daniela Brugger discusses approaches to the collaborative and solidarity-based use of digital technologies: In a first event, we will discuss the possibilities of digital technologies as empowering tools with three experts from the fields of architecture, design and art: How can digitalisation be used to meet local urban planning needs, create solidarity networks or support social movements? Which design methods are used and what influence does artistic thinking have on the use of these technologies? More information and registration via link in our bio. Graphic design: @amandahase

So much fun to be part of @ishinoko.jp this year. Yes to collective joy! 🫧🌸🎐🐛

How might we learn from the garden — a space of complex, biodiverse entanglements and transformations — as we cultivate places and communities that nourish resilience? For issue 10 of @r_o_b_i_d_a Magazine, we — editor LinYee Yuan of @thisismold and @fieldmeridians , designer Gemma Copeland of @commonknowledge.coop , and writer Linsey Rendell — weave a conversational carrier bag to feel out our ideas on gardening as a design method. Rather than an ending, this dialogue is a beginning — an invitation to collectively grow a discourse and create spaces where experiences, practices, and approaches to tending and exchange can collide, cross-pollinate, and contradict one another 🤝🌱🔀🔄💚 Photos of the magazine in Topolò/Topolove via the @r_o_b_i_d_a fam 📷

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Summer summer summer

Last semester we (@yayeva / @gemcopeland ) taught the Design / Non Design class @dellilusofona . We developed a new syllabus based on the workers’ inquiry: a methodology combining research with organising to produce new knowledge about working conditions from the perspectives of the workers themselves. Each week we practised different creative research methods like map-making, diary keeping, interviewing, close readings and surveys, and discussed issues prevalent in the design industry like precarity, the gender/race/class pay gap, unpaid or underpaid work, and self-exploitation. We had two guest workshops by Elvia Vasconcelos @sketchnotes_are_awesome on collaborative visual research and Afonso Matos @eletrico.verde on consciousness-raising, based on his book Who Can Afford to be Critical? (Thank you!) In the second half of the semester, the students worked in groups to creatively and collaboratively respond to some of the emergent issues they identified. We particularly loved Fora da Margem @fdm_podcast a podcast by one of the groups exploring the labour conditions within design, and the Designer’s Unplugged’s PicNic series, a monthly event bringing design students and professionals together to debate and share experiences about working in design. Our syllabus was based on research from Precarious Workers Brigade's Training for Exploitation handbook, the Transform Your Work toolkit by @commonknowledge.coop and @autonomy.uk and groups like @design_interns_club @uvw_dcw Brave New Alps and Evening Class 🦇 Thanks to all our students for your work and energy — we learned so much!