Design Roots

Culturally Significant Designs, Products, and Practices

Edited by Stuart Walker, Martyn Evans, Tom Cassidy, Amy Twigger, and Jeyon Jung

Design Roots provides a comprehensive review of culturally significant designs, products, and practices rooted in 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 globalization and urbanization. Yet they have much to offer for the future regarding 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 endeavors, 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.

Stuart Walker is Professor of Design for Sustainability at Manchester Metropolitan, Emeritus Professor at Lancaster and Calgary, and Visiting Professor at Kingston University, London. His books include Design for Resilience – Making the Future We Leave Behind, Design & Spirituality – A Philosophy of Material Cultures, Design for Life – creating meaning in a distracted world, and Design Realities – Creativity, Nature and the Human Spirit.

Martyn Evans is a product designer and design academic with 20 years research, teaching and leadership experience and is Director of Manchester School of Art. Interested in the strategic role that design commands in a variety of settings, his research explores the approaches designers use to conceptualize and communicate the future.

Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd is Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham School of Art & Design, part of Nottingham Trent University. Amy has authored and edited several books, including her monograph Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes.

Jeyon Jung is a Research Associate at Lancaster University, Lancaster, England, United Kingdom

Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022, softcover, 10 x 7 inches, 400 pages.