{ Possibility at the intersection of mobility }




Britta Boyer

designer, aesthetic connector,
critical and sensory ethnographic researcher, sustainable fashion pioneer,
deep ecologist, wannabe anthropologist, multiple-stories enabler based in the UK and Bali.




I am currently a PhD design researcher at Loughborough University, London (Design and Innovation) with an interest in the materialisation of decoloniality through design. My study sits at the intersection of mobility and possibility

(Current) Thesis title:
Unsettlement at the intersection of mobility and possibility: how to materialise decolonisation in design research and practice?

My research argues for solutions that need to be conceived from more responsible, holistic worldviews and culturally oriented practice. Designers practising within different countries can also import and export ideologies that may not align with the situated perspectives they find themselves in. Without a certain unsettlement, creative actions can further perpetuate structures of inequality. Thus, I do not look at the designed objects, but the worldview and lives of those who make and change things and the implications these have on the structures of living.

I aim to address both designer and researcher perspectives on how to materialise decoloniality through research and practice.



The story of ‘The Spirit of the Hibiscus’; world-making activities from Bali



The spirit of the Hibiscus is a creativity story of design otherwise, or design for other world making purposes that is a strategic response to the violence of universalism and Western imperialism.


This is a heuristic inquiry that facilitates storytelling through an intimate entanglement – thinking with the soil. Chakra, a Balinese sacred activist, and autonomous change agent directs his experiences to find relevant knowledge that both transforms himself and the community. Through his story, an epistemology of the South, we come to understand soil as a living infrastructure and one that is crucial for plant, animal, and human wellbeing. Framed in this way means to re-politicise the design literature through counter-narratives of creativity and worldmaking activity.


The aim is to present new ways of understanding plurality through integrated thinking that links the organic and sociocultural worlds through a synergy of biological, social, and political perspective. A shift in consciousness that understands humans as soil-forming and soil-destroying agents; worldmaking is a matter of life and death.



Digital stakeholder ethnography



Stakeholder ethnography, as described by Pink et al., is one not driven by economic interest alone but “ethics and value systems shared by stakeholders”. In other words, there are no power holders driving the research so the anthropologist sensibility that highlights the local people (rather than the anthropologist) are experts in their own world, is easier to maintain.



Other ways of seeing



This study explores the potential of digital ethnography and visual narratives in the film Paradise Paradigm to capture the interrelationship between fashion, travel, tourism, cultural diversity, environment, sustainable development and our own spiritual development in relation to Bali, Indonesia. If international tourism stakeholders, the community, and visitors to the island truly share a common interest for cultural and environmental preservation, new ways of understanding the impact developments are having must be sought alongside building community-based tourism.



Design Researcher



Other ways of seeing - Film as digital materiality and interlocutor for community-based tourism relationships in Bali


(International Journalism of Tourism Anthropology)


Keywords:

Digital ethnography; Community-based tourism; Bali; Visual narratives; Sustainable Design; Circular Economy; Othering; Autoethnography; Cultural Diversity; Paradise Paradigm




Fashion Footsteps



In an email exchange between anthropology Ph.D. candidate, Thomas Wright, and the researcher he states that “aside from tourism, the fashion industry also shapes foreign perceptions of Bali, as well as it having great socio-environmental consequences”.


(Interview with the Thomas Wright, The University of Queensland, 18 October 2016).



Ethnographic Researcher



Storytelling from the inside out.

Deep listening.



Auto-ethnography



The auto-ethnographic and design-led research is a response to the researcher’s experiences of living in Indonesia both as a small child and as an adult working in the fashion industry.


Ellis et al. define auto-ethnography is an approach to “research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience”. This approach challenges “canonical ways of doing research and representing others and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act”.




Sustainable Futures



Ezio Manzini (2015), a leading thinker in design for sustainability, discusses innovation and design as a solution to building a resilient culture. This requires people being "active" to generate conditions for this; the word active implies movement.


We need language that is both poetic and profound to engage change-makers in becoming active participants who can solve the world’s problems and build human and environmental connections. By empowering communities, building social equality and demonstrating choice through creativity, we are taking action.



Fashion Lecturer



Fashion must move beyond a disciplinary model of design and facilitate deliberate societal change. Educators need to consider how to facilitate fashion education to align with contemporary design thinking and research which recognises the importance for design to lead the way in sustainability, helping students to understand and shift perspective beyond adornment and a signifier of social mobility into shaping awareness to fashion as an agent of change. To encourage students to use critical thinking methods to interrogate the world and find design solutions that have a meaning and purpose beyond consumption. ​



Wayfinders Guide



The Wayfinders (a term coined by Anthropologist Wade Davis) were Polynesian seafarers who navigated the seas without sophisticated technology but through instincts. Instinct and future led thinking has been the driver of this body of work and gives design-led research and case studies within the publication. This is a work in progress and it aims to build new ways of understanding between different countries and cultures to develop strong international links that are of benefit to people in Indonesia, Britain and the rest of the world. A cross-collaborative approach through arts, science and technology and how human creativity can be applied to impact change by inspiring readers to use information in an action-driven way to impact a community and contribute to the world.



Background context:

My perspective is due to my own working relationships and experiences living and working in Bali for twenty years. These studies look at a practice-led phenomenon, situated perspectives of design practices located within the Global South, though not necessarily from it. The participant stories emerge at the intersection of mobility and possibility.

Whilst my participants move out of design as we may know it, their stories are more about moving beyond abyssal thinking in design.

The literature describes abyssal thinking as that which does not allow the co-presence of what is imaginable and what is not (de Sousa Santos, 2007). This study understood Beyonders' to be movement activists who found it necessary to deliberately dismantle and unsettle their own knowledge systems, through practice, to allow for new imaginaries to emerge. Beyonders is a term coined by Paul Torrance (Torrance, 1993) and the ways in which I employ it within the study can be understood through Braidotti’s nomadic subjects (Braidotti, 2006). Designers who are part of hybrid, transient communities who cut across the North/South divide to reinvent themselves through encounters with difference. Braidotti (2006) describes these encounters as transpositions of multiple belongings and constant flows of transformations through interactions and relationships with both people and the physical world. They emerge from situated place-based settings that act as instruments of awareness.