Indian Weaving in the time of COVID-19

These are the stark images from India that fill news feeds today: The exodus of India’s migrant workers, from its mammoth cities, enduring hunger and despair to get home, in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown. In contrast we point to images from craft activists in India, of the invisible artisans of rural India, still able to produce stably in their homes, even in these times. Invoking legislation that would permit the movement of cotton yarn as an essential commodity, they promise in return t..

Constructing common knowledge: Design practice for social change in craft livelihoods in India

From a policy point of view, the nine million craftspeople in India are underdeveloped economically and in need of expert design interventions to adapt to the market. Within nationalistic projects those same craftspeople are transformed into a heritage that needs to be preserved, rather than having a trajectory into a promising future. Is there an escape from these discourses of poverty or museumization when thinking about craftspeople? In response, this article investigates how design can be key to achieve social change that craftspeople desire. I propose that designers intending to mitigate vulnerability in livelihoods of craftspeople have to design not towards a pre-determined set of desirable economic outcomes, but include social and cultural outcomes. Using empirical examination of designer narratives as base, this article extends constructivist STS concepts of “cultures of technology” to “cultures of design” to elaborate three lenses to analyze design practice: Intervention, which focuses on the economic impact of development; Interaction that focuses on symmetric social relations between actors, within socio-technical ensembles that respond to nascent aspirations and needs of craftspeople; and Mediation, which includes constructing cultural worlds where craftspeople's expertise is common knowledge–as active producers of culture, rather than passive consumers of design

Innovation in Indian Handloom Weaving

Handloom weaving is the second most important livelihood in rural India after farming. Improving handloom technologies and practices thus will directly affect the lives of millions of Indians, and this is similar for many other communities in the global South and East. By analyzing hand-loom weaving as a socio-technology, we will show how weaving communities are constantly innovating their technologies, designs, markets, and social organization—often without calling it innovation. This demonstration of innovation in handloom contradicts the received image of handloom as a pre-modern and traditional craft that is unsustainable in current societies and that one should strive to eliminate: by mechanization and/or by putting it into a museum