Abstract
This paper explores craft as a site of making and thinking, asking how practice-based ethnography can extend design theory amid ecological and social uncertainty. Drawing on apprenticeship-style fieldwork (2024-2025) with craft communities in London (UK) and Yogyakarta (Indonesia), the study engages practitioners working across textiles, silver, gold, stone, wax-resist batik, wool, and silk. While textiles provide a methodological thread, the research examines how diverse materials shape knowledge through constraints, resistances, and affordances. Grounded in design anthropology and practice-based interpretations of posthuman and new materialist thought, material agency is understood as the capacity of matter and process to influence decisions and tempo. Craft operates as both method and metaphor: method, through parallel making that produces tacit, embodied knowledge; metaphor, through iterative acts of joining, casting, carving, and repair. Sustainability is approached as a situated ecological, economic, and social practice, reframing design as a relational, co-creative process attentive to continuity and care.
Keywords
Craft, Boundaries, Creative Ethnography, Sustainability
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.277
Citation
Bonney, M.J. (2026) Making Futures with Textiles: Boundaries, Practice, Sustainability, 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.2026.277
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Making Futures with Textiles: Boundaries, Practice, Sustainability
This paper explores craft as a site of making and thinking, asking how practice-based ethnography can extend design theory amid ecological and social uncertainty. Drawing on apprenticeship-style fieldwork (2024-2025) with craft communities in London (UK) and Yogyakarta (Indonesia), the study engages practitioners working across textiles, silver, gold, stone, wax-resist batik, wool, and silk. While textiles provide a methodological thread, the research examines how diverse materials shape knowledge through constraints, resistances, and affordances. Grounded in design anthropology and practice-based interpretations of posthuman and new materialist thought, material agency is understood as the capacity of matter and process to influence decisions and tempo. Craft operates as both method and metaphor: method, through parallel making that produces tacit, embodied knowledge; metaphor, through iterative acts of joining, casting, carving, and repair. Sustainability is approached as a situated ecological, economic, and social practice, reframing design as a relational, co-creative process attentive to continuity and care.