Design Process Interventions
A COLLABORATIVE STUDENT AND TUTOR RESEARCH PROJECT BETWEEN ISTITUTO MARANGONI
LONDON AND JACCD DESIGN SCHOOL AFRICA, ACRRA, GHANA. (PROJECT CONCLUDED IN 2022)
HOW MIGHT A RECIPROCAL KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE PROJECT BENEFIT
STUDENT LEARNING AT ISTITUTO MARANGONI LONDON AND JAACD
DESIGN SCHOOL, ACCRA?
…we are living with the legacies of ways of thinking that took their modern shape in the nineteenth century, and it is high time to subject them to the best thinking of the twenty first.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2018:XIII. The Lies that Bind. Rethinking Identity. Creed, Country, Colour, Class, Culture
Until the lion has his or her own storyteller, the hunter will always have the best part of the story.
Ewe Proverb
Abstract
New pedagogical approaches are urgently needed to combat cultural appropriation and stereotyping in fashion design, and to raise awareness of the contemporary value of indigenous textiles to their communities of origin, in order to resist the colonisation of local clothing cultures by Western systems and aesthetic norms. A collaborative project between the JACCD Design School Africa and Istituto Marangoni London has piloted and tested a knowledge exchange project, in which fashion students in Accra and London have shared their research and design processes to forge a deeper understanding of the materiality and symbolic meaning of Ghanaian cultural textiles, and an experience of how inspiration may be found in these, while avoiding appropriation.
Our research methods included project-based research, surveys of participants, interviews with some students and tutors, and a review of the fashion design work produced to assess impact. The research suggests that this collaboration will provide lasting benefits to the participants’ design practices, by enhancing the Ghanaian students’ appreciation of their indigenous textiles, and by improving the IML students’ understanding of, and sensitivity to cultural appropriation.
Xiaoyin Chen - MA FDW
Jialu Sheng - MA FDW
TEAM MEMBERS
Kirsten Scott - then Programme Leader for MA Fashion Design and MA Luxury Accessories Design at IML.
Mohsin Ali - Senior Lecturer in Fashion Design at Istituto Marangoni London.
Yvonne Ntiamoah - educational consultant and course leader for BA Fashion and Textiles Design at JACCD Design School Africa, in Accra, Ghana.
Samuel Bonney - BA Fashion and Textiles Design Lecturer at JACCD Design School.
In training the designers of the future, we need to develop new pedagogical approaches to enable students to understand the differences between inspiration and appropriation.
The project ran with 2 cohorts of students, with the outcomes and student feedback evaluated and compared. Shared sessions on zoom between students in London and Accra provided a friendly space to share research and work in progress, gather feedback to move the design process forward in the most ethical way.
Our process and activities
A collaborative project between IML MA FDW and LAD students and Fashion students at JACCD, Accra.
JACCD students presented their research into their own cultural textiles to IML students, explaining the symbolic meaning of patterns, colours and motifs, as well as fibres, techniques and processes.
The IML students were asked to use the Ghanaian fabrics as a starting point for their design research, but to introduce a personal narrative to their design concept too.
JACCD students attended some design sessions, to see and question the design processes and inspirations used by the IML students. Throughout this process, they gained insights into some of the design processes used at IML. They were able to shape what the IML students were doing, guiding them away from uses of cultural property that might cause offence or be otherwise inappropriate.
The IML students were able to gain live feedback on their design process, the ways that they were taking inspiration from Ghanaian culture and understand better what would be considered acceptable or not by the students in Accra.
Ting-Wei Huang
Theoretical framework
The research applied creative pedagogical theory, notably Biggs’ (1999) Teaching for Enhanced Learning and Orr and Shreeve’s (2018) Affective Student Communication.
It drew on Schön’s (1991) The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action, encouraging students to actively and critically reflect upon their experiences during the project, as crucial to a process of continuous learning.
Conclusions
This research demonstrates the value of reciprocal knowledge exchange and dialogue between fashion students in London and in Accra in directing an ethical fashion design process. It highlights the importance of in-depth research, dialogue, and reflection as crucial to understanding the meaning and contemporary potential of Ghanaian cultural textiles, to avoid their appropriation, stereotype or other offence. From the presentations by the JACCD students, IML students were particularly inspired by the underlying meaning of the textiles - so that their design process moved from a superficial application to a deeper engagement with, and reflection on how fashion might express or promote important concepts. Outcomes suggest that this dialogue enabled the IML students to gain a better understanding of the diversity, specificity and cultural significance of the Ghanaian textiles that were shared with them and heightened their sensitivity to some ethical issues attached to using these textiles as inspiration in their designs.
The reciprocal pedagogy has been appreciated by staff involved in the project at JACCD as being highly effective in supporting students to improve their research abilities. The students' learning experience was one of co-creation of knowledge within the collaboration, supported by lecturer interactions and peer learning, which led to them viewing themselves more positively within an educational environment and it thus encouraged the students’ self-confidence. Similarly, the outcomes include positive peer relationships in the cohort of students and improved teacher-student interaction at JACCD and IML. Furthermore, this process has encouraged JACCD students to reflect on their own thought process during their research, its delivery, its use as inspiration and through design development. It supported the students in learning actively to monitor their own understanding as they investigated the theories, stories and meanings behind their indigenous fabrics. The process taught the students to ask questions of the presented research within their peer group and with collaborative partners, and thus to engage actively in the process of knowledge exchange.
This pedagogical research contributes to the decolonisation of the fashion curriculum by showing how a fashion design process might be delinked from the extractive, imperialist paradigm of‘takeand use’that continues to prevail in contemporary Westernfashion. It offers a tentative model for a reciprocal approach to knowledge sharing and idea generation for fashion and textilesthathelpsstudents to understand and to avoid cultural appropriation and stereotype when drawing inspiration from the cultural property of others. It is hoped that this research will contribute to fashion design pedagogy by showing how fashion students in IML have actively constructed their understanding of the acceptable and the unacceptable when finding design inspiration, in partnership with students at JACCD, while both groups gained a deeper knowledge of the cultural significance and creative potential of Ghanaian textile traditions and of any prohibitions attached to these. The use of surveys and interviews with student and tutor participants prompted a deeper reflection amongst all parties on the learning that has taken place. This model is therefore transferrable to other contexts and to other design disciplines.
The full chapter about this research project appears in the book The Future of Fashion Education: speculation, experience, and collaboration, edited by Kirsten Scott, Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska and published by Routledge in October 2024.
Student feedback