City Research Online

Abstract

As a part of industrial mass production, the field of design has been deeply involved in the exploitation of natural resources. In design, better ways to approach the nonhuman-human relation are needed. In this article, we contribute by exploring how more-than-human perspectives can be used to engage with this relationship, and more specifically, by focusing on how the fields of design and craft relate to more-than-human worlds. Crafts are relevant as they are practices of making that preceded and exist beyond mass production. In design studies, more-than-human notions and posthumanist frameworks are still new. Although recent studies mention design in the context of more-than-human, they do not thoroughly integrate it within relationships between craft and design.
Through positioning a more-than-human approach within the craft-design relationship, the design field can learn from and shift to a more equal understanding between humans and nonhumans. The article addresses this by describing emerging craft and design practices, and by providing textile examples. Non-western textiles and their motifs are given as example artefacts that consider traditional and Indigenous knowledge in more-than-human worlds. By looking at these motifs from more-than-human perspectives, we suggest that design and craft can deliver a new approach for addressing nonhumans in human-made things.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publisher Keywords:	More-than-human worlds, craft and design, motifs, textile design, felting, decolonising design
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) N Fine Arts
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Healthcare Services Research & Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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