Design in Artisan Sector
Posted on December 18, 2017
Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash
Throughout the semester I have been reflecting on the work I have done before I came to the program. To give a small background, I finished my undergraduate in product design six years ago and in my last year at my program I started a project with a couple of students that we later attempted to turn into a business. The project looked at the artisan sector in Egypt and worked towards identifying ways design might be used to develop the largely underdeveloped industry. Now lets fast forward back to this past semester at Transdisciplinary design program, during which I was lucky enough to work as a research assistant for a research lab within the school that focuses on the artisan sector.
The artisan sector has been identified as the second largest sector of rural employment after agriculture in many regions of the world.1 And even though there is great potential in the sector to reduce poverty in the developing worlds, there is still a significant number of artisans who live below the poverty line. When I first entered this space I approached it with the lens of a product designer. Starting with the notion that perhaps the way to tackle this problem is by designing more desirable products for the artisans to make and sell to new unexplored markets. However, it did not take long to figure out that this was certainly not the only case. Reflecting on all the different readings we went through in the semester as well as the topics I was introduced to in my RA work, I started to question what the role of a designer might be, if any in this complex problem. In this post I would like to think through some of that questions.
As a start being clear on our intensions and the reasons we are entering into the space would help better define what and how our interventions would affect the people involved. If we enter the space with intensions of preserving the traditional culture of artisanal work, this would yield a very different outcome if instead our goal was to empower artisans and break the cycle of poverty. These two different goals raise important questions, for instance if our goal is to elevate poverty then perhaps it would be better to provide more support and skill building for artisans to be able to pursue other job opportunities. However, by doing that it would contradict the other goal of preserving culture which raises another question of why should the responsibility of preservation be placed on the artisans themselves and not on society as a whole? Would that affect the competitive edge artisans have of being experts in their crafts? Or by removing that responsibility we might be opening new territories for artisans to explore?
This struggle between preservation and empowerment also becomes visible when relating it to scaleability. Our perceptions of scaleability in my opinion is one of the major factors that affects the artisan sector. When we take the scenario that many organizations might go through when faced with the problem of matching the demand of the product with the artisans/workshops making capacity. Many times because the artisans/workshops do not have the infrastructure that would support big order quantities, organizations tend to work towards building and expanding those infrastructures where they would eventually have a big space with some sort of production line. What makes this different than a factory? Can we still constitute this as artistry? When we think of the culture preservation this approach might not be very aligned to that goal. However, when we think about it from the empowerment point of view it is creating more stable working opportunities for the artisans. Looking at the situation from another perspective makes it clear that it is not black or white, because even though the scaling to the bigger might create more job opportunities, changing the infrastructure would exclude stakeholders who depended on the old structure. For example, many woman end up in the artisanal work because it “offer opportunities for seasonal employment and small production runs, and the sector is often a default occupation for producers who have limited other options for employment.”2 It also allows people to work from home, manage their own hours and etc. Taking all this into consideration it is clear that having priorities set would help identify better leverage points to act on, in a way that benefits all stakeholders involved.
Another important issue that surfaces when working in the artisan sector is the notion of categorizing the work of artisans as art and not design, or putting the artisan under the frame work of manufacturer rather than designer. This point raises a bigger question of whether or not anybody can be a designer? Even though I still struggle to give a clear answer to this question, I do believe that changing the way we perceive artisans and their work, would greatly affect their position and progress. Working through these inquiries would help us better define our role as designers as well. For instance, if we were to see the artisans as designers then our role would be to build the infrastructure in way that would allow artisans to gain the skills needed to become a designer. Another option would be that if artisans were seen as master makers then perhaps the best way would be to partner with designers to design the products they make and so on.
In conclusion, as we have been learning repeatedly during the semester the way we frame the problem and the boundaries we create around the system, define the way we would intervene. It is extremely important to constantly zoom in and out to have clearer images of the whole system and most importantly it is essential that going into the work we enter through a mindset that recognizes that we do no know what is best for the people involved and we work cooperatively in creating new pathways. Furthermore, by understanding the complexity of the problem we understand that there is no one solution the would address the problem.
References:
1.2. Krivoshlykova, Marina, and Ted Barber. “Global Market Assessment for Handicrafts.” United States Agency for International Development, July 2016.