Soraya's Bamboo Build: 'Making Things Isn't a Mythical Skill Only Geniuses Have'

Soraya arrived at the Canning Town workshop with a plan to build a bamboo bike and then ride it on a zero-waste expedition. The expedition got complicated. The bike got built.

The Build

Four and a half days across two sessions — August and November 2019. Between the two, Soraya launched a major ocean plastic expedition at her day job. Then she came back to the workshop, back to the sanding she hated, back to the joints that needed finishing. She lacquered the frame with her website address on the down tube — soraya.earth — so if she ever did a long-distance ride, people could follow along.

The Line That Defines BBC's Mission

Her account of the build is the most honest piece of writing about the BBC workshop experience in the organisation's history. She describes the joy of selecting bamboo by colour and density. She describes the terror of a wrong measurement. She describes the misery of sanding bad joints and being told some people find it "very mindful."

And then she wrote seventeen words that are, collectively, BBC's entire mission:

"We are so divorced from where everything comes from, we think that building things is a mythical thing that only geniuses can do. When broken down, every step was actually simple and achievable."
— Soraya, BBC Maker, November 2020

What Changed

Building is not a gift. It is a skill. Soraya did not have it when she walked in. She had it when she walked out — along with a bamboo bicycle named Erica, and a fundamentally different relationship with the objects in her life. She now understands, from the inside, that the things around us are made by people with knowledge she can acquire.

Outcomes

• Full bamboo road bike frame completed across 4.5 days, two sessions
• Self-reported transformation: new confidence in making and problem-solving
• Zero-waste expedition planned using the finished bike
• Widely-read blog at soraya.earth documenting the full experience
• Quote captured: BBC's mission articulated unprompted by a participant

Erica is still rolling. The expedition is still planned. And the insight — that making things is not mythical, it is learnable — belongs to everyone who has ever felt excluded from the world of making by the idea that craft is for other people.