Thank you Amanda

The information you have provided is very useful and all the suggestions from the list so far have given me a little more push to get further involved in the project I described ...
And your email brings me an opportunity to say how much I appreciate your posts to the list - you are always a voice of reason :-)
Thanks again and Happy Christmas

Fiona

________________________________________
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Bill, Amanda [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 18 December 2011 20:43
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Does Culture Matter for Product Design? Malawian Cotton

Dear Fiona
Ena Brown has enormous practical experience creating successful 'western' products working with indigo dyed cotton from tribal producers in South East Asia. She is principal lecturer in Fashion and Textiles Marketing and Management at Nottingham Trent University.
Also, the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion, recently published a report on promoting sustainable Indian textiles which looked at positive and negative environmental, social and economic impacts along supply and value chains. They have identified key sustainability strands as "Organic and Fairtrade Certified Cotton, Handwoven Textiles, and Women's Groups and Cooperatives".

http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/2753/1/CSF-Promoting-Sustainable-Indian-Textiles-5-0.pdf

Might be good places to start?

Best wishes
Amanda

Dr Amanda Bill
Institute of Design for Industry and Environment
College of Creative Arts
Massey University, Wellington
New Zealand

+64 4 8015799 ex 62555

email: [log in to unmask]




On 19/12/11 12:34 AM, "Fiona Jane Candy" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi Teena, Lily, Jak, Ahmed, Don and Jinan ( apologies if I've missed anyone)

Yes I too think that jeans are cultural production,  as you say, a process of social meaning making. Just as other 'products' are. And I think they are also a product of culture - I don't see this as either/or. If we see culture as a communal practice that includes and excludes, in which human and non-human actors engage,  it is a constantly transforming, continuum of improvisation -  where making objects/products/services/activities etc 'weave' its current form. So in this understanding culture is a pair of jeans- or a piece of cloth or a toothbrush, or a washing machine, or a car, or an iPad... they are all part of the the network we make and inhabit - where humans are the weaver...the world is the material, and culture the cloth we weave...

I 'd like to ask the list for some advice  - this is a long post for me, and may initially appear to be a slight detour to the discussion thread but please  bear with me:

I am currently involved on the periphery of a project to aid a small group of cotton weavers in Malawi to weave and make products suitable to sell to the 'western' market. I am told that Malawi is the 7th poorest nation in the world and so sadly even Oxfam trading is not operating there. At one time Malawian cotton was grown and sold in Lancashire to be woven into cotton goods for Britain and its colonial markets. Today Lancashire ( where I live) no longer buys and processes this cotton, and neither does anyone else and the thread to cotton products was lost to. A western charitable foundation has enabled the reintroduction of weaving skills to a group of people who live on and near a Malawian nature reserve, and from what I understand the cotton growing and weaving began again. There are Malawian textile products held in museum collections in Africa, but the living craft had all but died. The local market for these products was mainly constituted of visitors to the nature reserve, and the weavers gained both livelihood and social status through this activity. However the viability of the weaving project is threatened now because sales dropped as tourism levelled off and reduced, and then the local Malawian people have needed to use the nature reserve again for their survival - by poaching its wildlife and cutting down trees etc. The people trying to turn this around are the members of the wildlife trust who are working to sustain the nature reserve. Its a human v wildlife/enviromental synergy on the brink of possible disaster, and one that tells us of the fraility of culture once it gets out of step with what is possible...

I've just recieved an email telling me that some pieces of cotton cloth have now arrived in UK from Malawi  for us to work with and see what we can come up with. For a designer this is an immensely challenging and complex project that offers a sense of agency and helplessness at the same time. Apart from the design challenge to create suitable products, that will have meaning for the weavers too, this area of Malawi doesn't have a phone signal and so access to the internet for a market or to PayPal for instance, etc to facilitate 'global' sales, is currently extremely difficult. Yet none of these problems are insurmountable and the return of viable 'products' could bring with it the infrastructure that is needed in the widest sense. But how can it be achieved? And where to start?

It would be great if anyone on the list can offer us any advice or direction from their experience, or are able to get involved in some practical way?

Many thanks

Fiona

________________________________________
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Teena Clerke [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 17 December 2011 22:09
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Does Culture Matter for Product Design?

Hi Lily and Fiona,

might we go a bit further and say that jeans are cultural production, a process of social meaning-
making, rather than a product of culture whereby the linked activities of ideation, designing, making,
producing, packaging, advertising, distributing, selling, buying, wearing, admiring, recycling jeans
(these activities often occurring at great distance from one another) produces culture. That is, as
multi-modal, multi-phase, multi-situated, coordinated, networked and relational activities of
meaning-making iThis might disrupt the binary of
making/wearing and the hierarchy in raw/manufactured 'things' that comprise the staged production
activities of making jeans from woven cloth, itself produced through a vast number of ideation-
farming-industrial-manufacturing processes, that are not always linear and stable.

Although I am not a textile or clothing designer, in a previous life I worked for many years in the
clothing manufacturing industry in Sydney collaborating with designers, pattern makers, cutters,
fabric and accessory importers and 'home-makers' (offsite, but not offshore, piece work
manufacturers) as a production manager, which is an ironic title now I think of it. I quite like to think
of this time as having shaped how I engage in a certain kind of cultural reproduction when wearing
ready-made, or homemade clothing (my mother was a dressmaker who taught us girls to sew from
an early age).

my 2c worth,
teena

> I would say that jeans are a product, with clothing being a higher level
> category and cloth itself being 'raw matter'. But anyways, I am curious
> why do you (Do you?) think of the meaning that is enacted through the use
> of clothing as being encoded in a binary format?