Pocket Change

MORGAN MARTINO AND NAOMI BOYD
MENTORSHIP FROM KATE FLECTCHER, UNION OF CONCERNED RESEARCHERS IN FASHION

Pockets facilitate the interactions we have with everyday objects and the world around us. They give us autonomy and freedom to carry things, privacy for our possessions, spaces to share, exchange, and demonstrate reciprocity with our friends and community. Their size and placement can show us gender inequality, their contents; wealth inequality, their materials and construction; environmental injustices.

Pocket Change is an opportunity to engage others in dialogues related to experience of gender, class, place and the environment through accessible and shareable design activities centering around pocket equity. These activities will explore the repair/reuse/redesign of pre-existing artifacts and materials as a sustainable practice, rather than relying on the consumption of new products. They will be celebrations of identity sharing, storytelling and worldmaking through textiles. We see this moment as an excellent occasion for individuals and communities to interrogate their role in global material and cultural economies, to create and enact meaningful and significant paradigm shifts within our relationship to textile design, production, consumption, and equity.

See Pocket Change Presentation (October 2020)

Morgan Martino is entering her fourth year of Industrial Design at Emily Carr, as well as working towards a SPACE minor. Her work focuses on the study and appreciation of vernacular objects, obsolete media and archaic technologies as tools for community building and clues to alternative consumption cycles. On campus, she is the creator and leader of The Mixtape Collective and Vintage Digicam Club, a host of Pronoun pin work-shops, as well as a research assistant for the Health Design Lab and Graphic Research Unit. Her work has been featured in SEITIES magazine, Woo publication, and shown at Penn State Graduates in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Conference 2018. 

Naomi Boyd is going into her fourth year at Emily Carr, working on completing an Industrial Design major with a minor in SPACE. Her work here has led to an interest in community-engaged design, exploring analogue material practices as means for social innovation and expanding modes of thinking. Most recently, she has been working to organize Climate Cut, a project based in community and sustainability, and volunteers as a literacy mentor with the Writer’s Exchange in Strathcona.


Pocket Change is a Satellite x DESIS project, a five-month residency in partnership with the Shumka Centre for student-led project teams to develop major sustainability and social innovation projects. Residents have access to studio space, mentorship, peer support and funding toward the goal of initiating events, programs, or community partnerships; developing products or services; or starting studios, collectives, agencies or non-profits.