Sustainable Design
Moving Textile Artisans’ Communities towards a Sustainable Future: A Theoretical Framework
Francesco Mazzarella, Carolina Escobar-Tello, Val Mitchell
Loughborough Design School
F.Mazzarella@lboro.ac.uk
Keywords: textile artisans’ communities, social innovation, sustainable future, service design
Abstract
The current economic crisis is building momentum for designers to challenge the linear take-make-waste model and explore sustainable strategies, services and systems. With this in mind, this research explores how service design can encourage textile artisans’ communities towards a sustainable future, providing social engagement, rescuing cultural heritage, boosting economic development and enhancing environmental stewardship. Service design is here proposed as an approach to empower such communities, co-design collaborative services and sustain innovations within an enabling ecosystem. The paper focuses on the first study of this research where a theoretical framework to help textile artisans’ communities transitioning to a sustainable future was co-developed with academic experts in the field. A Nominal Group Technique and semi-structure interviews were used to collect data; results and findings are presented as barriers, enablers and a manifesto to encourage a sustainable future. To conclude, next steps and challenges posed by the envisioned future are discussed.
This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
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Cite this paper: Mazzarella, F., Escobar-Tello, C., Mitchell, V. (2016) Moving Textile Artisans’ Communities Towards a Sustainable Future – A Theoretical Framework. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme