Design Roots provides a comprehensive review of culturally significant designs, products and practices which are rooted to particular communities through making tradition and a sense of place. Many rich traditional practices associated with community, tacit knowledge and culture are being rapidly lost due to globalization and urbanization. Yet they have much to offer for the future in terms of sustainability, identity, wellbeing and new opportunities in design.

This book considers the creative roots, the place-based ecologies, and deep understandings of cultural significance, not only in terms of history and tradition but also in terms of locale, social interactions, innovation, and change for the sustainment of culturally significant material productions. Importantly, these are not locked in time by sentimentality and nostalgia but are evolving, innovative, and adaptive to new technologies and changing circumstances.

Contributing authors explore the historical roots of culturally significant designs, products and practices, emerging directions, amateur endeavours, enterprise models, business opportunities and the changing role and contribution of design in the creation of material cultures of significance, meaning and value.

An international perspective is provided through case studies and research from North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australasia, with examples including Aran jumper production in Northern Ireland, weaving in Thailand, Iranian housing design, Brazilian street design and digital crafting in the United Kingdom.

Craft has deep roots and heritage but these material skills and ways of working are just as relevant today as they were centuries ago. Critical writing on craft, such as Design Roots, is crucial to ensure it continues to evolve and thrive. * Rosy Greenlees OBE, Executive Director of the Crafts Council, UK *
A balanced, insightful, integrated agenda... a collaboration of thoughtful practitioners that offers fruitful research... The insightful editors and creative contributors managed to avoid most difficulties seen in edited volumes: the range of quality, the consistency of the essays, and the enlarged sum of the book impressed me... These pages do not offer sentimentality and nostalgia but promote the evolving, innovative, and adaptive nature of traditional, culturally significant designs, products and practices... [I] enjoyed the satisfaction of an admirable accomplishment... I would recommend this edited volume to thinking practitioners and researchers looking for inspiration – it is full of ideas worth pursuing. * K. Scott Swan writing for the Design Journal, Routledge *

Stuart Walker is Professor of Design for Sustainability at Lancaster University, UK.

Martyn Evans is Professor of Design at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Tom Cassidy is Chair of Design at the University of Leeds, UK.

Jeyon Jung is Research Associate at Lancaster University, UK.

Amy Twigger Holroyd is Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham Trent University, UK.