Papers by Francesco Mazzarella
This paper reports on a participatory case study conducted for a doctoral research project, inves... more This paper reports on a participatory case study conducted for a doctoral research project, investigating how service design can be used to activate textile artisan communities to transition towards a sustainable future. Using multiple service design and co-design methods, a meaningful intervention was activated within the context of a textile artisan community in Cape Town (South Africa). The service designer elicited tacit knowledge into compelling narratives and facilitated a process of making sense of sustainable futures. As a result, the artisans joined together as a community, with the common purpose of sharing information throughout the supply chain and making it accessible through a service platform. In conclusion, this paper discusses the diverse roles the service designer can play in order to activate meaningful social innovations with communities and outlines the limitations of this case study as well as recommendations for further research.
This report documents the ‘Making for Change: Waltham Forest’ project led by Dr Francesco Mazzare... more This report documents the ‘Making for Change: Waltham Forest’ project led by Dr Francesco Mazzarella in partnership with London College of Fashion (LCF) and London Borough of Waltham Forest (LBWF) for London Borough of Culture 2019 (LBOC) and the Great Place scheme. Adopting a design activist approach, the project aimed at engaging, through fashion and making, local schools, businesses, residents and hard-to-reach communities in order to develop and retain creative talent in the borough and address issues affecting the community, such as deprived youth, skills shortage, fashion manufacturing decline and unemployment. The project also aimed at bringing together LCF and LBWF as long-term partners with aligned strategic objectives and shared plans beyond LBOC 2019, contributing to the LCF Knowledge Exchange framework and East Bank Strategic Objectives. The report starts with an overview of Waltham Forest and its fashion-related activities to set the context and background of the projec...
Self-production is a human-centred design process, which shows how design is moving towards the m... more Self-production is a human-centred design process, which shows how design is moving towards the management of the entire process (design, production, distribution, communication) rather than focusing exclusively on the final product. Humanities can support self-production not only upstream, as a source of inspiration for mindful projects, but also throughout the process to manage the user involvement in practices of participatory design, as well as downstream, for designing the distribution and the communication of a product in an anthropocentric way.
The global economic and environmental crisis seems to be leading to the end of a ‘linear economy’... more The global economic and environmental crisis seems to be leading to the end of a ‘linear economy’ based on consumption and waste, while setting the ground for redistributed micro-productions, inspired by new ethics of sustainability and cutting-edge economic models. With this in mind, this paper is focused on exploring textile artisans’ communities, bottom-up and humancentred 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 apparel. Literature on textile artisanship has shown the potential for the application of service design to empower collaborative communities and co-design relational services triggering holistic sustainability. Through participatory action research, this project intends to fill a gap within the strategic agenda, which could create sustain...
How can service design drive textile artisans’ communities towards a sustainable future? [Poster]
Making for Change: Waltham Forest is a partnership project developed by London College of Fashion... more Making for Change: Waltham Forest is a partnership project developed by London College of Fashion, UAL (LCF) and Waltham Forest Council for London Borough of Culture 2019 and the Great Place scheme. The project uses fashion activism as a catalyst for positive change in the borough, aiming to ensure a lasting legacy within the community. Led by Dr Francesco Mazzarella (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Centre for Sustainable Fashion, UAL), this exhibition comprises of three main areas – education, manufacturing and community – all of which examine the narrative of the artefacts, the makers and the stories. The education theme showcases Making for Change: Waltham Forest’s contribution to embedding sustainability and future thinking in young people’s education. This section displays the teaching resources developed by LCF staff and a number of works produced by students from Waltham Forest schools. Paying attention to issues of social, cultural, environmental and economic sustainability...
The global economic and environmental crisis is creating momentum for designers to challenge the ... more The global economic and environmental crisis is creating momentum for designers to challenge the current “linear economy” based on a take-make-waste model, and explore strategies, services and systems inspired by new ethics of sustainability. Within this arena, textile artisanship is becoming an interesting opportunity for opening up resilient micro-enterprises, addressing the disruptive challenges posed by future trends (e.g. slow consumption, alternative economies, redistributed manufacturing, flexible production, circular economy, advanced artisanship, design entrepreneurship and enabling ecosystems). In particular, this research is focused on textile artisans’ communities, bottom-up and human-centred aggregations engaged in giving form and meaning to local natural fibres, by hands or by directly controlling mechanised and digital tools, and managing the process of making culturally and socially significant apparel. With this in mind, a theoretical framework has been developed, o...
Closed access. This is a powerpoint presented at the DesRes Conference, 6th April 2017, Loughboro... more Closed access. This is a powerpoint presented at the DesRes Conference, 6th April 2017, Loughborough, UK: Loughborough Design School.
The global economic and environmental crisis is leading to the transition from a linear economy b... more The global economic and environmental crisis is leading to the transition from a linear economy based on consumption and waste, towards new ethics of sustainability and cutting-edge business opportunities. Textile artisanship is an interesting opportunity for opening up flexible and redistributed micro-enterprises, while bridging local realities with global markets. It is a key contributor to sustainable development as it catalyses cultural heritage, provides social employment, boosts creative economies and enhances environmental stewardship. This PhD aims to explore how service design can strategically contribute to encourage textile artisans’ communities towards a sustainable future. This means empowering artisans’ creative assets and social bonds, codesigning collaborative services and scaling up initiatives within an enabling ecosystem at a glocal level.
This is a presentation for the Conference PhD by Design: Researching Across Difference, Goldsmith... more This is a presentation for the Conference PhD by Design: Researching Across Difference, Goldsmiths University, London, UK, 5th-6th November 2015
An interactive live art performance, inspired by catwalks, focusing on self-expressing, making an... more An interactive live art performance, inspired by catwalks, focusing on self-expressing, making and performing, to express issues of fast-fashion, global trade, waste, and the social impacts of Brexit on fashion design and manufacturing businesses. The event took place in a disused supermarket, soon to be transformed into a fashion hub. Created by Rosemary Cronin with Alma Tischler-Wood as part of the artist collective Foreign Investments, with Dr Francesco Mazzarella and MA students from the Fashion Futures course at London College of Fashion.
This paper reports on the evolving landscape of design research in the UK over the last 12 years.... more This paper reports on the evolving landscape of design research in the UK over the last 12 years. Through a rigorous analysis of a sample of 379 design research projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper presents a detailed account of the evolution of AHRC-funded design research and how various factors – such as the financial value, project team size, collaborating organisations, and the geographical spread of design research in the UK – has changed in the period between 2002 and 2018. The paper examines the nature, scale, and diversity of UK-based design research and how it is increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative. Furthermore, it shows the extent to which design researchers are dealing with significant social, cultural, economic, and environmental issues including those articulated in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Furthermore, whilst highlighting issues overlooked in contemporary forms of design researc...
This paper analyzes some self-production and craft processes which can contribute to social innov... more This paper analyzes some self-production and craft processes which can contribute to social innovation. Object of this research is the concept of self-production, considered as a humancentered design process held by a designer-maker who, working within a community of artisans or a platform of digital fabrication, manages the entire process, from design, to production, distribution and communication. This research covers a broad spectrum of material that relates to the changing landscape within the design world and beyond, drawing the heterogeneity and complexity of self-production. Diverse approaches developed in the contemporary design scene have been mapped, defining new relationships and highlighting peculiarities, strengths and weaknesses. Linking these diverse approaches is the new role of the designer, who embraces wider areas and acts as catalyst of social innovation, actively involving diverse actors in the design process. Such a figure embodies both the designer’s knowledge...
The mainstream ecosystem has proven unsustainable in terms of livelihood, environmental stewardsh... more The mainstream ecosystem has proven unsustainable in terms of livelihood, environmental stewardship, cultural heritage, and social equality. To alleviate these problems, a range of top-down strategies has been deployed, but they are often ineffective in addressing the specific needs and aspirations of diverse contexts. On the other hand, bottom-up initiatives started by communities also face organisational and resource limitations that prevent them from becoming resilient. Within this context, service design for social innovation has become a well-established human-centred, strategic and systemic approach to tackling such challenges. However, designers have put much emphasis on the use of fixed toolkits that result in one-size-fits-all outputs. Instead, this thesis argues for a more situated and embedded approach to service design. With this in mind, the aim of the research was to explore new roles, purposes and methods the service designer can adopt to activate communities to trans...
Journal of Service Management, 2021
Purpose: This paper discusses how service design can be used to activate a transition of textile ... more Purpose: This paper discusses how service design can be used to activate a transition of textile artisan communities towards a sustainable future. Design/methodology/approach: Two participatory case studies were undertaken with textile artisans in the UK and South Africa. These led to the development of an original methodological framework for ‘crafting situated services’ – services designed to be meaningful to the local communities within which they are embedded. An evaluation study assessed the originality of the framework, its relevance for tackling real-world problems, its extensibility and the rigour of the research process. Findings: The framework brings together a variety of roles, methods and tools that designers can adopt in order to enter communities, make sense of sustainable futures, facilitate the co-design of situated services, and activate legacies within communities. Building on emerging anthropological approaches, the framework makes a bridge between service managem...
The Design Journal, 2021
This paper reports on a research project aimed at exploring how designers can activate and sustai... more This paper reports on a research project aimed at exploring how designers can activate and sustain entrepreneurial ventures within regional textile communities in the Philippines and the UK. The mindset of consumers, who believe that textiles and fashion should be cheap, has made it difficult to successfully enable regional textile communities. With this in mind, two case studies were undertaken through semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in creative enterprises within regional textile communities in the Philippines and the UK. Findings from the research demonstrate how design-driven approaches to entrepreneurship can lead to reaching an untapped market and securing consumer demand for products and services that are better for people and the planet. The original contribution of the paper lies in the development of a business model meta-canvas, informed by an original conceptual framework that, once successfully adopted, could activate and sustain enterprises in reg...
The Design Journal
To counter the mainstream fashion system, which is proving unsustainable in terms of autonomous l... more To counter the mainstream fashion system, which is proving unsustainable in terms of autonomous livelihoods, cultural heritage, social equality, and environmental stewardship, some designers are playing an activist role, challenging the status quo and activating positive change. With this in mind, we have embarked on an ongoing research project aimed at exploring ways in which design activism can create counter-narratives towards sustainability in fashion. This paper explores these ideas through a case study focused on the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF). Through semi-structured interviews and a co-creation workshop, we mapped out examples of work undertaken by CSF members, and elicited their contribution to building a transformed fashion system. Hence, in this paper we articulate the diversity of roles, values, skills, and methods that fashion activists can adopt, as well as some of the challenges and opportunities for designers and researchers in transforming the fashion system towards sustainability.
The Design Journal
This paper explores the opportunities, challenges and needs of the next generation of design rese... more This paper explores the opportunities, challenges and needs of the next generation of design researchers (NGDRs) in the United Kingdom. As part of the first author's ongoing Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Design Leadership Fellowship, the paper reports on a series of ten NGDR workshops held across the UK, which explored the processes involved in developing, writing, and applying for an AHRC grant. The paper presents feedback from the NGDR workshop participants, who contributed to furthering our understanding of what research areas they are interested in investigating, what research-related issues they need support with, and what research opportunities they envisage for the future. Over 800 next generation design researchers attended the NGDR workshops across the UK. This paper reports on feedback from almost 200 NGDR workshop participants who articulate the highly collaborative, innovative and impactful design research they wish to undertake in the future.
The Design Journal
This paper presents a novel conceptual framework for assessing design research projects. Present-... more This paper presents a novel conceptual framework for assessing design research projects. Present-day design research is typified by projects, which traverse disciplinary, methodological, and conceptual boundaries that often have wideranging social, cultural, and economic impact to industry, government bodies, and the wider public. Given design's application in addressing serious issues ranging from antimicrobial resistance to mobility, from ageing to migration it can be difficult to understand and unpick the exact nature and scale of design research and the roles that design researchers and designing (both processes and outcomes) play. The design research conceptual framework has been developed as a communicative tool for illustrating levels of design involvement in a project. The paper highlights the design input involved in current design research and provides a comparative measure of design's role in a wide range of projects that fall under the umbrella term of "design research" in the UK.
Fashion Practice
pursued a PhD at Loughborough Design School, exploring how service design can be used to activate... more pursued a PhD at Loughborough Design School, exploring how service design can be used to activate textile artisan communities to transition towards a sustainable future. Currently, Francesco is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), sponsored by Neal's Yard Remedies, investigating ways in which design activism can create counter-narratives towards sustainability in fashion.
Uploads
Papers by Francesco Mazzarella
Given that the possible intersections between entrepreneurship, social innovation and contemporary design are many, and highly diverse, the following sub-themes have been defined within this Thematic Area. They cluster together diverse projects, and in this way, they offer a more precise expression of what is actually happening in DESIS Labs in regard to lines of action and thought.
In this spirit, the DxSIE thematic area is currently characterised by three main sub-areas:
1 Design for Distributed Production and Circular Economy
2 Design for a New Craftsmanship
3 Design for Social Inclusion and Empowerment
Waltham Forest is home to an exciting range of fashion businesses and other creative enterprises, with exceptional artisanal heritage as well as a strong aspiration for sustainability. Yet the area is noticeably affected by inequalities and challenged by related concerns regarding deprived youth, skills shortage, decline in fashion manufacturing and high unemployment rates. With these challenges in mind, the aim of the project was to explore ways in which fashion and making can be used as catalysts for positive change and to activate legacies within the local community. In order to achieve this aim, participatory action research was undertaken through a range of activities in relation to education, manufacturing and community engagement, grounded in the themes of makers, fellows and radicals.