Abstract
Vietnam’s textile and apparel industry, one of the world’s largest garment exporters, is under growing pressure to shift from labour-based to design-led and sustainable business models. However, applying Western co-design frameworks within the hierarchical and production-driven context of large enterprises reveals significant cultural and structural constraints. Drawing on in-depth interviews and reflexive journaling, this paper reports findings from two phases of an ongoing project and examine how design participation is understood and enacted across Vietnam’s fashion eco-system, contrasting the relational practices of micro and small enterprises with the fragmented processes of large manufacturers. It introduces đồng-design, a culturally situated approach grounded in the Vietnamese value of togetherness, as a systemic way of designing collaboration across scales. By articulating đồng-design as both a conceptual and practical framework, the study contributes to pluralistic understandings of systemic design and highlights pathways for building design capacity and collaborative agency.
Keywords
đồng-design; systemic design; co-design; togetherness
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1826
Citation
Lam, L., and Cleveland, D. (2026) Đồng-design: Designing togetherness as a systemic approach to Vietnam’s textile and apparel transformation, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1826
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Đồng-design: Designing togetherness as a systemic approach to Vietnam’s textile and apparel transformation
Vietnam’s textile and apparel industry, one of the world’s largest garment exporters, is under growing pressure to shift from labour-based to design-led and sustainable business models. However, applying Western co-design frameworks within the hierarchical and production-driven context of large enterprises reveals significant cultural and structural constraints. Drawing on in-depth interviews and reflexive journaling, this paper reports findings from two phases of an ongoing project and examine how design participation is understood and enacted across Vietnam’s fashion eco-system, contrasting the relational practices of micro and small enterprises with the fragmented processes of large manufacturers. It introduces đồng-design, a culturally situated approach grounded in the Vietnamese value of togetherness, as a systemic way of designing collaboration across scales. By articulating đồng-design as both a conceptual and practical framework, the study contributes to pluralistic understandings of systemic design and highlights pathways for building design capacity and collaborative agency.