To craft, by design, for sustainability

Abstract

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.