Design Roots: Culturally Significant Designs, Products and Practices

Design Roots provides a comprehensive review of culturally significant designs, products and practices which are rooted to particular communities through making tradition and a sense of place. Many rich traditional practices associated with community, tacit knowledge and culture are being rapidly lost due to globalisation and urbanisation. Yet they have much to offer for the future in terms of sustainability, identity, wellbeing and new opportunities in design.

This book considers the creative roots, the place-based ecologies, and deep understandings of cultural significance, not only in terms of history and tradition but also in terms of locale, social interactions, innovation, and change for the sustainment of culturally significant material productions. Importantly, these are not locked in time by sentimentality and nostalgia but are evolving, innovative, and adaptive to new technologies and changing circumstances.

Contributing authors explore the historical roots of culturally significant designs, products and practices, emerging directions, amateur endeavours, enterprise models, business opportunities and the changing role and contribution of design in the creation of material cultures of significance, meaning and value.

An international perspective is provided through case studies and research from North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australasia, with examples including Aran jumper production in Northern Ireland, weaving in Thailand, Iranian housing design, Brazilian street design and digital crafting in the United Kingdom.

Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd is Professor of Alternative Fashion Systems at Nottingham School of Art & Design, part of Nottingham Trent University. She has explored the emerging field of fashion and sustainability since 2004, initially via her craft fashion knitwear label, Keep & Share. Amy's work has been featured in various exhibitions, books and publications, from Vogue to Fashion Theory. Her research today focuses on fashion transitions: the participatory exploration of alternative, open and plural fashion systems that respect the Earth's capacity to support life.

Amy's Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded Fellowship project, Fashion Fictions, brings people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems. Other initiatives include Reknit Revolution, a project supporting knitters to rework the items in their wardrobes, and research networks Stitching Together and Crafting the Commons. Amy has authored and edited several books, including her monograph Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes (I.B. Tauris, 2017).