Production to consumption systems are shifting to developing countries as they are emerging markets, cheap labour and huge renewable resource bases. There have been several design initiatives aiming to leverage this labour and resource base to tap sustainability aligned markets, as these materials are inherently renewable. Unfortunately, most of these attempts take a technology-intensive industrialized route. This destroys traditional economies and skill sets, instead of mindfully recontextualizing them and realigning them with contemporary sustainability oriented markets thus contributing to the sustainability of these value chains and global sustainability in general. This paper presents design science research, which explores how craft can be deconstructed into sustainability design parameters —including social, economic, ecological and cultural tenets. Craft and the non-industrial production to consumption systems that comprise it—including localized natural resource management, participatory design, socio-economic systems, material culture, and indigenous bioregional knowledge-based livelihood strategies—offer valuable inputs into design for sustainability praxis. However, both craft and sustainability are unfamiliar domains for the industrial designer. Therefore, this paper proposes the Rhizome Approach and the mechanisms to actualize it, towards facilitating craft-design collaborations for sustainability. This includes the Holistic Sustainability Checklist, which seeks to deconstruct craft into sustainable design parameters, familiar to industrial designers. The applications of this approach will be discussed, including the refinement and use of this framework by the author for UNIDO in Vietnam in order to brand and market Vietnamese craft SMEs with the aim of aligning them to sustainability oriented markets.@en

Current sustainable design initiatives and approaches are already looking at using industrial techniques and technologies to recontextualize renewable materials to create innovative products and systems to suit global markets. However, the design outputs from these initiatives—while being mindful of ecological sustainability and targeting sustainability markets—do not leverage the huge workforce and cultural resources available in developing countries, where thesematerials occur abundantly and form part of traditional craft practice. These products, therefore, disregard the need and opportunity for design to also consider the social, cultural and economic dimensions of sustainability—and thus serve as a vehicle for holistic sustainability. This is a missed opportunity to holistically impact sustainability—and sustainable development—especially since craftspeople in the developing world are increasingly vulnerable to unsustainabilities caused by a loss of markets resulting from the influx of industrial products. If design were to build upon traditional developing-world craft production-to-consumption systems, rather than bypass them in favor of a mainstream, industrialized technology-push approach, the resultant products would be built on culturally sustainable traditions, using ecologically sustainable materials, crafted in a labor-intensive manner, and target viable sustainability-aligned markets; thus orchestrating holistically sustainable production-toconsumption systems. Actualizing this potential calls for alternative design approaches that can generate collective benefits to the ecology, society, economy and culture in developing countries. This research, therefore, aims to improve sustainability design approaches, and thereby practice, especially in the domain of MSMEs working with renewable materials in developing countries.@en