Textile Design Theory in the Making

Elaine Igoe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350061583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design della moda

Textile design inhabits a liminal space spanning art, design and craft. This book explores how textile design bridges the decorative and the functional, and takes us from handcrafting to industrial manufacture. In doing so, it distinguishes textiles as a distinctive design discipline, against the backdrop of today's emerging design issues. With commentaries from a range of international design scholars, the book demonstrates how design theory is now being employed in diverse scenarios to encourage innovation beyond the field of design itself. Positioning textiles within contemporary design research, Textile Design Theory in the Making reveals how the theory and practice of textile design exist in a synergistic, creative relationship. Drawing on qualitative research methods, including auto-ethnography and feminist critique, the book provides a theoretical underpinning for textile designers working in interdisciplinary scenarios, uniting theory and texts from the fields of anthropology, philosophy, literature and material design.

1

Too much to tell

Autoethnography

Developed over the past fifty years as a response to colonialism and issues of representation, autoethnography is used as a critical approach to knowledge-making across a range of fields. Carolyn Ellis, a leading autoethnographer, tells how she came to develop her autoethnography as a poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist researcher contesting issues of authority, representation, voice and method (Adams, Holman Jones and Ellis 2015: 3). She describes how, as an approach to her field of ethnography, it united her ‘sociological eye with a communicative heart’. Autoethnography was a way to overcome the crisis of representation, to avoid generalizing and homogenous positivism and to recognize the subjectivity of the situated researcher.

Autoethnography is a qualitative method – it offers nuanced, complex, and specific knowledge about particular lives, experiences, and relationships rather than general information about large groups of people. (Adams, Holman Jones and Ellis 2015: 21)

The research presented in this book began as personal questions, doubts and stories I told myself, about myself and my situation. I came to a point in my career in design academia where these feelings and thoughts surfaced in direct confrontation to what I was rationally, objectively researching. It got to a point where I was forced to deal with them. Autoethnography permitted me to take the route that allowed for complexity and subjectivity, recognizing this juncture as a ‘personal-cultural entanglement’ (Adams, Holman Jones and Ellis 2015: 22). I aim to achieve the four principles for evaluating autoethnography as set out by Adams, Holman Jones and Ellis (2015: 102–4).

1. Make contributions to knowledge

2. Value the personal and experiential

3. Demonstrate the power, craft and responsibilities of stories and storytelling

4. Take a relationally responsible approach to research practice and representation

This book seeks to contribute to design research and develop design theory. It does this through valuing collective subjective experience in the field of textile design, expressed through narrative methods, both directly told and restoried or fabulated. It is structured through and upon a framework of critical relationality – informing both its premise and its delivery.

Ellis and Bochner’s paper Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject (2000) tells us a story about what it is to be an autoethnographer, what it is to learn about autoethnography and how the approach developed within the broader field of narrative enquiry. Its storied style makes it easy to read and accessible, even though its content is complex. Reading Ellis and Bochner’s work inspired me to write large the changes that have happened throughout my research journey, accepting that edges of my various bits of writing are ragged and frayed, not smooth and sharp. They overlay, enmesh and entangle; they don’t tessellate. And I won’t try to make them, either.

[T]he researcher’s personal experience becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the culture under study. Reflexive ethnographies range along a continuum from starting research from one’s own experience to ethnographies where the researcher’s experience is actually studied alongside with other participants, to confessional tales where the researcher’s experience of doing the study becomes the focus of investigation. (Ellis and Bochner 2000)

Through reflective writing, through co-creating stories with other textile designers, through the structuring and presentation of this book, I am expressing an autoethnography. I am expressing my life, my character, my constraints, my relationships and my position on textile design in the world. In this book can be seen the evidence of the story of its development. In some ways I wish I could be braver, dating each piece of writing, placing it firmly at the point at which it was thought, written and rewritten, resisting polishing and tessellation. I do consider this text as my creative research practice. My textile design aesthetic is experimental, conceptual, revolving around processes, drawn to texture and nature. My research approach is drawn to equivalent qualities within research methods and methodological design.

Conversation

The key tool I have used to retrieve the fragments of experience is the recorded conversation. The key thoughts presented in this book were based on a series of fifteen recorded conversations which took place between February 2009 and March 2011 and developed through countless informal conversations, emails and further academic work in the years since. These recorded conversations were initially set up as unstructured/semi-structured interviews, but most played out as conversations. At the time, I berated myself as researcher for jumping in and talking, but it was too difficult not to. I was talking to textile designers. I am a textile designer. I teach textile designers. Most of the so-called ‘interviews’ had been arranged through mutual contacts, or we were fellow alumni. I was inextricably connected to the people I was talking with. I felt at ease and let myself seep into the talking. The individuals I spoke to were students of textile design, world-famous textile designers, textile studio owners, designer makers, textile innovators, commercial textile designers, textile design lecturers, embroidery designers, print designers and weave designers. Some I was in awe to be speaking to, others were literally old friends. They took place in my research space, in cafes, in their studios; I spoke to friends over the phone while they were at work and strangers invited me into their kitchens to talk over homemade soup. Each scenario was interpersonal: trans-subjective encounters, to use Ettinger’s terminology.

For the first set of conversations in 2009, I arrived with a list of specific questions that I hoped to pop when the moment should arise. They covered these main areas: working and thinking methods for textile design, communicating design ideas and outcomes for textiles, self-awareness and identification with the concept of textile design. This list of questions often stifled the conversation as it began to emerge. The talk would then begin to loosen and I would steer it ridiculously back to my questions, the dialogue jumping about wildly.

One particular question proved problematic: why do we design textiles? The designers found this question difficult, both to understand and to answer. This question later morphed into me asking about the ‘role of textile design’. I wanted to know how the textile designers see the significance of their work.

For the ensuing conversations from 2010 and 2011, I allowed a more natural flow of conversation. At this stage I was more comfortable with open-endedness and had set down some of the specificities I was targeting in the initial conversations.

My personality, my relationships, my research expertise (or lack of it) and my textile knowledge were all brought to bear on each conversation. This is evident as the textile designers talked to me about tutors we had had in common, shortened names for our alma mater and initialisms for certain trade events. In Living Narrative, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps champion the conversation, specifically personal narratives and everyday storytelling, as a means of exploring narrative for three key reasons. It affords an inherent open-endedness, is a medium for airing unresolved events and it elicits familiarity (2001: 6). They describe how conversational narratives reveal the vernacular and a way of ordering, explaining and establishing a position on experience (2001: 57).

Some of the mutual connections we held were unknown at the outset, only coming to light precisely through conversation, in turn simultaneously building and altering the nuance of the talk. The familiarity that was often established at times turned the direction of the conversation back to myself, the textile designers asking me about my design work and research. Other times, I do this for myself, offering up thoughts and comments for debate that are unique to that specific conversation. This dialogue meant that although I was always the initiator of the talk, I did not hold all the control over it. It became a conversation rather than interview because of its dialogical content. The active participation from both parties changed and altered the direction and content of the talk (Ochs and Capps 2001: 55).

Informal conversations and encounters have naturally influenced my approach to bookmaking. It so often goes without saying but it shouldn’t. Conference presentations and invitations to speak at events that seemed to me at first to be a tangent opened up new areas and connections – new words too. Academics finding my (old) work for the first time allowed me to see its currency as well as its flaws. Students using, testing and challenging my work to make their own new work is so directly encouraging and invigorating. Being part of that process as a PhD supervisor is a privilege as well as a prompt as a researcher.

Stories and fabulations

The outcomes of these conversations can be read as narratives, or ‘everyday stories’, as Ochs and Capps put it, about the lives of these textile designers. These stories include elements of delight, regret, humour, anger, nostalgia, mundanity and reflection. Some aspects have been well rehearsed in prior conversations; others show new ideas and perspectives surfacing within that moment. The notion of extracting rational ‘truth’ from these stories is nonsensical. Each textile designer has told me a story about their experience of being a textile designer. Walter Benjamin parallels everyday storytelling with the physicality and materiality of making.

[A story] does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. (Benjamin 1936: 91)

And the structure and content of the stories told to me at that time were affected by me: my own story and my own questions.

For it is granted to him to reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his own.) His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life. (Benjamin 1936: 108)

These stories do not hold truths but commonalities of experience that might develop new knowledge and understanding, ‘openly or covertly, something useful’(1936: 86):

In fact, one can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful and unique way. (Benjamin 1936: 107)

The Talking Textiles chapter offers a piece of creative writing for which I used a process recommended by Ellis and Bochner (2000: 752). They suggest using a process of emotional recall where the writer revisits a scene emotionally and physically. In this piece, I blended two conversation scenarios together to help indicate the trans-subjective encounter that took place, focusing on motifs of interconnectedness and reflexivity. Ellis and Bochner highlight the advantage of recalling these emotions as close to the experience as possible; however, for me, it was what I experienced in the years between that allowed me to reflect and connect the two scenarios, offering a perspective on my research methodology and methods.

The writing methods myself and the contributing authors employ are a combination of conventional academic writing interspersed with examples of creative non-fiction (Tedlock 2011: 336). Tedlock characterizes creative non-fiction as factually accurate, polyphonic and scenical, and centrally positions the researcher/author as character. The various pieces of creative non-fiction that punctuate this book were written at different times: they are independent but are connected through my experience as textile designer and researcher.

Ronald Pelias (2011: 660) describes how writing might function as a both a realization and record. He cites M. L. Rosenthal’s quote from 1987 suggesting that writing is ‘the unfolding of a realization, the satisfying of a need to bring to the surface the inner realities of the psyche’, and remarks on the difference of ‘writing up’ and ‘writing into’. I use words to help me discover what I want to say. Pelias goes on to explain how realizations recorded and brought about through writing can be felt with confidence or some level of doubt, but that these realizations importantly ‘unfold on a continuum from the personal to the pu blic’, supporting feminist ideology; he then quickly cautions on separating the personal and the public/political. The writing that makes up this book moves between and conjoins both objective and subjective writing styles as required, recognizing that both have their place and that all writing is a record. Older pieces of work have been cut and spliced with very recent writing and reconfigured. Personal narratives sit alongside conventional styles; mythologies and literature are incorporated into analytical texts; the sections do not flow directly into one another but largely rely on the heuristics of the reader to establish the connections.

In Critical Fabulations (2018) Daniela Rosner uses ‘fabulation’ to displace established understandings of design. To fabulate is to talk or narrate in fables – to invent, concoct and fabricate. Rosner takes this concept from writer Saidiya Hartman who developed critical fabulation in her own work as an approach to re-storying. Rosner describes how in her fabulated account of a project which combined quilting and electrical engineering in a design context, she hopes to expand the opportunities for the groups and spaces in which design takes place and in doing so ‘reorient what lies ahead’ (Rosner 2018: 1). Rosner clearly sets out her feminist technoscience research approach and based on this challenges established design theory. She designates these as four dimensions:

• Individualism – design as an aggregation of individuals.

• Objectivism – design as science paradigm promotes rationality and objectivity.

• Universalism – designers ‘imagine’ things about their target ‘users’.

• Solutionism – to identify opportunities, designers often direct towards predefined solutions.

Avoiding setting up a binary position, Rosner describes the tactics (Rosner 2018: 15) with which she challenges these dimensions:

• Alliances – demands that design recognizes that it operates in concert with and not on behalf of the groups for whom it works.

• Recuperations – ‘the possibility of design to ignite recuperations enlivening neglected histories of encounter’ (Rosner 2018: 14).

• Interferences – propose alternative frames of analysis to expand and change existing regimes.

• Extensions – design is remade over time, across contexts and in circulations of practice.

There are two stori...