Service Ecosystem: Empowering Textile Artisans' Communities towards a Sustainable Future

Abstract

The global economic and environmental crisis is leading to the end of a linear economy based on consumption and waste, while setting the ground for opening up resilient, flexible and redistributed micro-productions, based on new ethics of sustainability. With this in mind, this research is focused on exploring textile artisans’ communities, bottom-up and human-centred economic aggregations embodying the craft atmosphere of a territory due to physical proximity and shared material cultural background. Such communities are engaged in giving form and meaning to local natural fibres and managing the process of making culturally and socially significant garments. Currently, the textile crafts discourse is mainly based on patchy practices and individual making experiences, overlooking the human and social dimension of artisanship. It is still missing a strategic agenda which could create sustainable interconnections within this complex landscape. Therefore, this research aims to explore how service design can strategically drive textile artisans’ communities towards a sustainable future. This will be done through a holistic process based on a triple bottom line: empowering artisans’ creative assets and social bonds, co-designing collaborative services and scaling up initiatives within an enabling ecosystem of inter-networked textile artisans’ communities at glocal level