Sensing the System

The textile industry is one of the most damaging industries to our environment, including everything from cultivation to finished products. In short, we need a drastic change in our textile production.

Many people in Switzerland within the textile industry are trying to use material alternatives to circumvent negative environmental impacts. One of them are hemp fibers for textile applications. Hemp has not only many environmental benefits and belongs to a local cultivable plant, but also has properties well suited for the application of home textiles. However, there are several barriers people are facing to adopt hemp textiles in the interior home textile sector.

This thesis investigates the topic of hemp textiles and understanding why this ancient plant is not used more for textile applications, and how we can help people in the textile and hemp industry to foster hemp textiles.

The people engaged in adopting hemp textiles, are facing these problems alone although they have the expertise in the different areas required. Somehow, they do not engage in a meaningful exchange with others to actually expand that crucial knowledge, even though the interest and engagement are widely existing. The goal of designing an intervention was to help people tackling this problem by facilitating this exchange and make an impact to the environment.

Strategy

To understand barriers of suppliers and peoples struggles to advance the development of producing local hemp textiles, several research and co-design methods were applied.
In order to actively connect these people and facilitate interactions and interfaces between these relevant expert fields, a platform to facilitate knowledge exchange was created. This platform brings all these people to one table and ensures valuable exchange and eventually a meaningful development in fostering and adopting hemp textiles.

Emergence

Further course of actions can be explored and implemented and brought to tangible events, such as collaborations between stakeholders and advancing the development in production.

The values created for these people with this intervention are:

• Bringing stakeholders to one table
• Helping people by providing measures to tackle the topic and problem
• Human-centered approach through interactions, empowerment, and participation
• Communication and mobilization
• A platform for further course of actions (collaboration and development)
• Expanded network of engaged stakeholders

Poster Exhibition