Announcing the 2022 Social Design Seed Fund awardees, plus 2021 project reports

For the second year, UAL Social Design Institute is working with researchers from across the Colleges to support and develop small scale practical projects that address an area of social or sustainable design, through the Institute’s Seed Fund.

The three successful applicants from LCF, Chelsea and LCC submitted responses to the 2022 call for submissions, with highly relevant proposals on designing decolonised cultural sustainability with refugees; cultural heritage innovation in digital textile archives; and restorative justice in film practice.

The awardees and their projects:

• Dr Francesco Mazzarella, Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Design for Social Change, LCF: Reality, Reciprocity, Resilience: Scoping a Decolonised Process of Designing for Cultural Sustainability with Refugee Communities   
• Bine Roth, Associate Lecturer in Textile Design, Chelsea: Karighor Archive
• Iris Wakulenko, Associate Lecturer, MA Documentary Film, LCC and Project and Digital Producer, Ethics for Making: Towards Restorative Narrative

The awardees will now take forward these research/KE projects over Spring/Summer 2022, with support from the Institute team, mentors across UAL and external partners.

The projects in detail

Reality, Reciprocity, Resilience: Scoping a Decolonised Process of Designing for Cultural Sustainability with Refugee Communities – Dr Francesco Mazzarella 

With mass displacement of people on the rise, refugee communities are becoming a prominent presence in many towns and cities, bringing with them their own approaches to fashion and textiles.  As things stand, designers are often ‘parachuted’ into these marginalised communities with the assumption that their expertise is the necessary to 'improve’ fashion design practice.

However, there is growing recognition of the need to ‘decolonise’ such dominant approaches. Reality, Reciprocity, Resilience aims to investigate the lived experiences of refugees in East London in relation to the themes of cultural sustainability and community resilience, to inform the future development of a framework for decolonised fashion design practice.

Drawing on desk research and interviews with the members of Poplar HARCA and other relevant organisations, the project team will utilise design ethnographic methods - such as storytelling and sensemaking activities, mediated by textiles, clothes and accessories owned or inherited - to map out the social fabric of the refugees, collect stories of cultural heritage and community resilience, understand their fashion and textile design and making skills, and collectively outline visions for a sustainable future.

This project will contribute to amplifying the refugees’ voice and agency, re-examining research methods and advancing a cultural sustainability agenda within a fashion and textile industry context.

Karighor Archive – Bine Roth 

Working with design studio Paraa based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the Karighor Archive project focuses upon a design challenge involving UAL’s post-grad student community. It looks at how to preserve and contribute to innovation in cultural heritage through collaborative digital means.

Thanks to funding from the British Council, Bine has already been developing a participatory digital textile archive in collaboration with the National Craft Council Bangladesh (NCCB), which can be seen as an online ‘toolbox’ for a virtual craft-making community.

With the SDI Seed Fund, Bine will invite UAL students to collaborate with artisans based in Dhaka to use and test the archive. A design challenge will be set bringing together craftspeople and designers from Bangladesh and the students to collaborate online, drawing upon the archive to create new textile crafts using sustainable materials.

The main aims are to share best practice, open-source ideas and stimulate creativity, but also to use craft in an inclusive way to foster collaboration across class, gender, language, and disciplines by highlighting the importance of an arts-led and participatory approach. Through making visible the skills and talents of the craftspeople in Bangladesh, the project enables them to become advocates for their culture.

Towards Restorative Narrative – Iris Wakulenko 

Towards Restorative Narrative develops the concept of restorative justice in the new context of film practice, in a partnership with The Forgiveness Project (TFP). It will encompass a documented seminar with The Forgiveness Project, featuring victims/survivors' and perpetrators' perspectives, media professionals and leading thinkers in the field of restorative practices.

The project builds on Design for Dialogue: Valuing Doubt in an Age of Conviction, a Social Design Institute position paper by UAL Professor Prātap Rughani. A corollary output will be an AHRC funding bid to build towards a model that can be used as a reference for students and practitioners seeking a way through the stances of polarity in media.

2021 Seed Fund outputs

The Seed Fund Award initiative launched in January 2021, with 2 projects taken forward last year:

‘The Real Me’: Addressing Youth Violence Through Creativity - a co-creation project between Box Up Crime and UAL

Led by Val Palmer, Senior Academic Recruitment Coordinator, CSM and David Preston, Platform Leader, Strategy & Identity, Graphic Communication Design Programme, CSM