{ Building emotional geographies }




Britta Boyer

futurist, sustainable fashion, design provocateur, ethnographic researcher, deep ecologist, wannabe anthropologist, storyteller, 4th order designer based in the UK and Bali.



I am currently a PhD design researcher at Loughborough University, London (Design and Innovation) with an interest in design and development. Creativity has been instrumentalised as a strategy for development between nations. It could be argued that creativity has been homogenised and that design, part of the creative industries, is complicit in destructive practices that perpetuate inequality. Framed from a Western and economic perspective, often these cultures of creativity fail to include everybody.

My research argues for solutions that need to be conceived from more responsible, holistic worldviews and culturally oriented practice. The work embraces a case study approach situated in Bali, a non-Western reference point through which to provide a contextualised understanding of creativity as human experience and interaction. Through field studies, critical reflections of the experiences of designers in their life-world encounters will be analysed to understand the relevance of ‘aesthetic experience’ in shaping mindsets, identifying concepts, reality and social actions of designers as an opportunity to change, diversify, learn and adapt. It is this that makes a person a Beyonder.

This investigation contributes a renewed understanding of creativity from multiple and non-Western perspectives, complementing current Design anthropology literature with a Beyonder framework in which to recognize the relational dimensions of life, such as the impact that human experience(s) have in bringing about awareness and responsibility for driving social system change.



Current PhD Design Research



“Creativity is not what most people think it is” (McIntyre, 2012)


Howkins identifies the lack of understanding of how creativity and innovation actually work as problematic for the creative industries, particularly when a review of the literature demonstrates the many ways in which creativity is used as a hegemonic term within policy that goes largely undisputed (Schlesinger, 2007). Norman Fairclough (Fairclough, 2000) has demonstrated how it embodies a particular worldview, linking assumptions about the global economy that have nothing to do with creativity.


We can understand the UK context better with spatial variation, hence this research will be structured around an immersive case study, Bali, as an external reference for cross-cultural comparison to capture multiple perspectives, from both here and there, and to provide real life context for both bottom up and top down research.



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.



Building emotional geographies combines qualitative research with fashion industry experience within the context of geographical sciences. Although ethics, labour geographies, post-colonial politics and gender inequalities are part of the contemporary fashion industry research and conversations, Britta Boyer’s work challenges whether that conversation goes deep or wide enough. The hypothesis is that embodied emotional relationships and an interdisciplinary approach based on deep listening, combined with research-led design helps expand perspectives beyond the Western-centric viewpoint. This research challenges the Western-centric viewpoint by highlighting that emotions have their geography, culture, history, seasonality, psychology and economy. It is all too easy to assume that one’s own cultural milieu is natural, with others deviating from the norm. The tourism industry in Bali provides the framework for this research and challenges us to create more sustainable futures through innovation and new ways of seeing.

Anthropologist, Wade Davis, states in his work that people are the solution, not the problem, so how difficult can it be to start to address some of the problems we all face through globalization if deep listening and conversation could be key components. The key is to use our instincts and emotion positively and engage people to look through a new lens.



If you would like to get in touch - we can discuss research, design, Bali, world travel, the milky way and even the meaning of life.


britta@brittaboyer.com