For sixteen editions, WEAVE used the essay to examine objects, materials, labour and the systems surrounding them. The Field Journals begin a second phase: more photographic, more immediate and closer to the work as it unfolds.

Field Journal 001 begins with care, not as an abstract value, but as something visible in looking, checking, measuring and returning.

FIELD JOURNAL 001

CARE

Care is often described as a value.
Here, we seek evidence of it.

LOOK / CHECK / ADAPT

W — WORK

Care is a method

The Kisumu Tote began as a proposition: a simpler, useful sisal bag that could move easily through everyday life without losing the integrity of its material or making.

Once the object existed, it began to ask questions.

Are the proportions right? Is the form consistent? Will it work against the body? What should remain the same, and where should the hand of the maker remain visible?

A prototype is not simply an unfinished product. It is an idea encountering reality. The drawing proposes; the material responds. The maker interprets. The person inspecting the object notices what none of them could have understood alone.

This is where care becomes visible.

It appears in the willingness to look again, to distinguish natural variation from oversight and to revise the original idea when the object produces new information.

But care cannot end at the surface of the basket. It must also shape the instructions, relationships, time and labour surrounding it. A well-resolved object cannot compensate for a poorly designed process.

Good design does not simply care about its outcome. It cares about the conditions under which that outcome is made.

The basket asks questions

Sharon examines the first Kisumu Tote sample at our workshop studio in Kenya.

Sharon turns the first Kisumu Tote over in her hands. She presses the base, checks the corners and draws the yellow tape across its width. The measurements are written down, but the object has already supplied information that the original drawing could not.

The first object is not the final answer. It is the moment when an idea begins to encounter material, scale and use.

I am Kenyan, African and a woman. These are not details I add to my work afterwards; they shape what I notice in the first place. I am drawn to the labour that holds things together, to knowledge carried through hands, conversation and repetition, and to work that becomes invisible precisely because someone has done it well. Care sits behind much of what I make, not as sentiment, but as attention and responsibility for what happens next.

The first sample brings the drawing back into conversation with the object.

E — EYE

Where the measure begins

A measurement appears objective, but someone must decide where it starts, how the object should be held and what degree of variation matters.

Precision begins with judgement.

A — ARCHIVE

Maintenance

The work required to keep something alive.

In 1969, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles challenged the division between celebrated acts of creation and the repetitive work of cleaning, checking, repairing and beginning again.

The idea matters because design culture still favours the launch over the maintenance that follows.

The measurements, corrections, messages and repeated decisions behind one basket belong to that less visible creative labour.

Maintenance, 2026. Original illustration for WEAVE, developed in dialogue with Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Manifesto, 1969.

Illustration: WEAVE / Plenty Power, created with generative AI.

V — VOICE

The room where it is all happening

The headquarters, archive, design studio and occasional site of a misplaced cup of tea.

Some desks suggest a person has completed one task before beginning another.

Mine is not one of them.

PAMYO sits beside LESSO. VUMBI is somewhere behind the second screen. WEAVE occupies the notes pinned to the wall and several notes that have fallen from it. CHAI JUJU is being lived.

Cables cross the desk with ambitions of their own.

The room holds the practical difficulty of building several connected things with limited time and money. Some days, this feels like an ecosystem. On others, it looks very much like a woman with too many browser tabs open.

Care, in this setting, includes deciding what deserves attention today. The answer changes. There is no elegant method yet, although the notebooks keep suggesting that one may be imminent.

E — ECHO

A question for the future

When care requires more time, labour and money, who should carry its cost?

WEAVE FIELD JOURNAL 001 / CARE
Written and edited by Linda Odhiambo Hooper
Published by Plenty Power · August 2026