This chapter has reviewed relevant literature in order to provide a background and theoretical underpinning to the study connecting craft, design, heritage and participatory methods as well as displaying their interdependent relationships. Initially, section A highlighted the definitional, historical and contextual distinctions between craft and design with debates on the dichotomies it created within local and global ties. Whether these are East–West, First world–Third world or Developing–Developed, section A showed how design might be considered as an authorised discourse over traditional craft; in return bringing its attention to craft and design interventions. Section A further highlighted the association of craft as an umbrella term; hence the research led to drawing a framework in conceptualising its area of study by exploring craft as a heritage practice.
Section B discussed the concept of heritage; defining heritage and tradition because the terms are often misunderstood and misinterpreted. It considered the criticisms around heritage discourse, particularly between tangible and intangible aspects, with the recent attention to safeguarding living cultural practices, as is in traditional craft. For that it reviewed the policy frameworks of cultural heritage. The study argued that it is important to discuss both heritage and craftwork in the realm of globalisation, as both have been shaped by global forces. It suggested the need for framing the research as a comparative study to discuss how the production of heritage happens within local- global or Western-Eastern divisions. It also proposed the need for designing community-driven participatory approaches to heritage management by including multiple stakeholders in the process as that is said to be lacking in heritage studies.
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Section C therefore argued how participatory approaches in design studies could be considered as a plausible approach in safeguarding and managing intangible cultural heritage. It recognised that there is value in design studies, especially its usefulness in providing tools and methods to include multiple stakeholder views as that is the gap missing from heritage practices. Additionally, it showed how design studies and heritage studies can be complementary to each other in minimising their limitations. The section reviewed commonly found participatory approaches and built the case for design anthropology in terms of providing a holistic view, connecting both the tangible and the intangible while raising cultural awareness and valuing the local. It also argued for overcoming the authorised notion in heritage which deals with power and asymmetry. Additionally, it discussed how design anthropological approaches could be plausible in addressing the authorised discourse in the field of design by showing that the cultural concerns are added to the interventions, when design is said to be driven by Eurocentric epistemological foundations. This required proposing methodologies for decolonising design and heritage in craft development discourse. In doing so, section C thus identified one challenge for this thesis, that of designing an engagement model for heritage craft and design interface. The participatory engagement model that shall be developed in this thesis will be well equipped to plug that gap, suggesting ways to connect craft, design and heritage studies. It would thereby try to minimise the “‘ongoing ruination’ and defuturing effected by colonialism, modernity and development and its intensification with globalisation”, when design practices in the Global North are said to be inappropriate for what goes on in the Global South as well as for the crisis in the North (Escobar 2017a, p39). In that sense, the engagement model that will be proposed in this research is anticipated as being able to serve both Global North and Global South projects.
: Research Methodology
Chapter 3
The previous chapter proposed a conceptual framework to identify how a study of craft and design should be conducted, with emphasis on heritage and participatory design methods. This chapter therefore, discusses the methodological concerns of this research study as it explores the connections between local-global, when craft as a heritage practice meets design in its professional context and examines different knowledge practices entailed therein. The methodology was guided and shaped by the philosophical stance of the research, which in return informed the research design. The following section justifies the choice of research philosophies, methods and data gathering and analysis techniques in relation to the research’s aims and objectives.
3.1 Research Philosophy
According to Saunders et al. (2012, p127) research philosophy relates to “the development of knowledge and the nature of that knowledge”. It deals with practical considerations the researcher has to make during the research process and the way in which the researcher views it. Therefore, it informs the research design from strategy to research methods to interpretation.
The research philosophies adopted in this study fits broadly within an interpretivist, constructivist and pragmatist frame in all. Such an overlap of different research traditions, classifications and methods is common in research, and while it can create a “tautological confusion” in research design (Mkansi and Acheampong 2012), scholars advise to choose the research philosophy according to the aims and the context of the research study, as there is no best single fit of a particular philosophy to any research (Saunders et al. 2012, p19-20, Ormston et al. 2014). Interpretivism is described as “a school of thought that stresses the importance of interpretation as well as observation in understanding the social world”, whilst constructivism emphasises “that knowledge is actively ‘constructed’ by human beings, rather than being passively received by them…[where] both focus on understanding lived experiences from the points of view of those who hold it” (Ormston et al. 2014, p13). This research pays attention to those meanings and interpretations constructed by its participants and to the socially constructed nature of those meanings. Meanings are mutually constructed between the researcher and the different social actors involved in the research (as participants), in
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addition to various interpretations and understandings obtained through observations and the collected data. Not only were interpretations grounded based on the data provided by participants, but interpretations were also drawn from the researcher’s exegesis relating to wider theories and subjectivity towards the collected data. A combined approach of interpretivism and constructivism was considered suitable, and therefore a qualitative approach to the research design was taken to obtain as much detailed information as possible.
The research, was conducted by a ‘pragmatic researcher’ (Onwuegbuzie and Leech 2005). In as far as the study had specific research questions linked to different stages of the research process, the pragmatic approach allowed combining both qualitative and quantitative methods to best answer each question, and allowing to work with different philosophical traditions, rather than just one (Saunders et al. 2012). Reviewing the aims and objectives of this study also confirms why a combination of research philosophies and approaches were adopted to answer ‘what’ ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions, rather than ‘how many’ (Ormston et al. 2014, p3). Within this research the qualitative component is thus the largest regarding the overall research design, but towards the end, a quantitative aspect was strategically chosen given the practical nature of the study as it required gathering responses from a variety of participants in a short period of time.