• many companies are struggling to compete with Asian manufacturers who are
able to produce similar range of jewellery products at a cheaper price (Gay
Penford, Manager, JIIC, interview, 4-11-05);
• the split structure of UK’s jewelry industry - firms specialising in purchasing or
retailing jewelry - obstructs growth because the former are inclined to buy vast
quantities of standardized products, with the result that shops tend to have the
same line (Gay Penford, interview, 4-11-05);
• jewelry companies are suspicious of graduates because they feel that they ‘are
not yet suitable for the workplace because they lack experience’, while many
graduates feel that ‘manufacturing is second to designing’ (Gay Penford,
interview, 4-11-05).
To support Birmingham’s jewelry industry to reposition itself in the domestic and overseas
marketplace and young jewelers to develop their vocational practice, the CT worked in
partnership with the Jewelry Industry Innovation Centre (JIIC) - part of the University of
Central England, Birmingham, with a remit to provide support in research and development
in the UK jewelry industry - and with whom the CT had a close working relationship. The
JIIC had extensive experience of designing placement schemes, consequently, the CT felt
confident about delegating responsibility for designing and managing the new scheme - the
Design Work Placement Project - which was funded via the EU Programme EQUAL,
trusting the JIIC to involve appropriate companies and graduate jewelers in the scheme.
One of the attractions of this source of funding is that it is unencumbered by UK
government targets for education and training, therefore, it enables partners to co-configure
work placement schemes according to their needs, rather than as a means to realize
externally imposed targets (Gay Penford, interview, 4-11-05; Sylvia Broadley, Project
Director, CT, interview, 28-11-06). The Design Work Placement Project was based on a
‘three-way partnership’ where manufacturers were prepared to give recently qualified
jewelers an opportunity to develop a new range of commercial products based on their
research because they had faith in the JIIC’s track record in identifying new talent, recently
qualified jewelers were prepared to work for a small bursary in order to learn how to
incubate (i.e. create, cost and monitor the fabrication of their designs) because they
appreciated that this would provide an invaluable opportunity to develop their vocational
practice and to develop a profile within the sector, and the JIIC were prepared to act as
mentors for the jewelers and as project managers because they understand that working and
learning are a single integrated strand of activity rather than two separate and disconnected
activities (Gay Penford, interview, 4-11-05). The scheme ran for six months and involved
10 companies and 10 designers (Kate Thorley, Project Manager, JIIC, interview, 10-5-07).
The CT and JIIC felt that this provided sufficient time for the design (i.e. formulation of the
project-object) and production (i.e. instantiation of the project-object) phases to occur.
The scheme was explicitly designed in the following way to integrate individual and