TEXTS
Earth Logic Gardening: A practical guide to growing ecological, social, cultural and economic change
If we genuinely want to make sufficient change, the vision we are working towards must also be reflected in ’how’ we work for change. Inspired by the metaphor of gardening – a situated gentle, caring way of nurturing new life into being, which anybody can do, virtually anywhere – this guide supports change work from initial and precious idea to a mature garden of change. With insights from a broken fashion system, this guide translates the Earth Logic framework to wider audiences and contexts – whether you are working with change within an organisation, or are planning some guerrilla gardening.
Book by Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham (2023), with beautiful illustrations by Karishma Chugani Nankani and design by Hanna Bergman. Free to download.
Spread from Earth Logic Gardening book.
Design Hanna Bergman, 2023.
Metadesign meditation to find agency for careful Earth work from within a ball of yarn
What if a big barrier to change is a paradigm of ‘know-it-allness’ and a paralysing fear of not having an overview and grand plan? What could it be like to instead accept uncertainty and sink into complexity? This text takes the reader on a meditation and journey of change from within a ball of yarn – a messy entanglement of social, cultural, economic and ecological considerations. By carefully holding on to your thread, opportunities to engage with the world and to make change unfold from within. The yarn meditation introduces examples of friction as well as opportunities at the level of the individual, the collaboration and community, and in relation to big global frameworks.
Book chapter in Metadesigning Designing in the Anthropocene edited by John Wood and published by Routledge, 2022.
Yarn dance from Me to We to World and Back Again with metadesign nests.
Design Mathilda Tham and Stacey Rossouw, 2022.
Caring From Fashion: Letter to Emerging Fashion Activists
When I started my journey as a change agent, I felt I had to roll out the carpet as I walked – I was missing role models and mentors. I wrote this text as if to a younger sibling in change (but of course with tonnes to teach me as well), hoping that some of my experiences can be of help. My main points are: 1. Make you own definition of fashion and thereby your work space, 2. Find and make supportive community, 4. Practice making a fuss: no friction – no change!
Article in Critical Fashion Project edited by Maria Ben Saad, published by Beckmans College of Design in 2020. Available online.
Caring From Fashion.
Design Mattias Jakobsson and Peter Ström for
Equality
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a key thinker on what it means to be human and what it takes to make peaceful societies. I was honoured to contribute in an anthology on the value of her work for design. My chapter discusses the notion of Equality in Hannah Arendt's work, and how equality can purposefully be practised in and through design. It proposes a set of principles for designing equality specifically informed by the notion that genuine equality work is risky and involves vulnerability, because it necessitates taking sides: not being anti-racist is being racist. Because racism, as well as sexism, ableism and ageism are structural, we are all complicit and there is no middle ground. The chapter points to the intersectionality of sexism, racism and other frequent grounds of oppression with hierarchies of ways of knowing, and in particular how we value mind cleverness over knowing through body, practice, relationships.
Book chapter in Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon, edited by Virginia Tassinari and Eduardo Staszowski and published by Bloomsbury, 2020.
Walking with concepts of Hannah Arendt.
Photo Eric Snodgrass, 2020.
Oikology – Home ecologics
Oikology – Home Ecologics: A book about building and home making for permaculture and for making our home together on Earth is a recipe book for house holding within Earth’s limits.
Sharing the journey from a three year long metadesign research project, it imagines that home making can start from caring relationships, from the very local level to the global scales, and between people, other species and Earth. The book includes a critical history of housing: ‘From dirt Sweden to luxury hotel’ (‘lort-Sverige‘ was the journalist Lubbe Nordqvist’s description of a Sweden characterised by poor hygiene standards and poverty from 1938). The book shares speculative scenarios for housing provision, as well as hands on tips for planning homes – whether as policy making, construction and architecture, or as an individual or community. It contains a range of ‘recipes’ for home making – many of which were created by participants in the process. The book is intended to start to perform a new field of knowledge – home ecologics – the knowing and skills we need to make our lives together within Earth’s limits.
Oikology – Home ecologics (2019) is a result from the project BOOST metadesign, which Mathilda Tham led and conducted together with Åsa Ståhl and Sara Hyltén-Cavallius, Department of Design, Linnaeus University. The book is designed by Johan Ahlbäck. You can order a paper copy of the book or download a digital version here.
Oikology – Home Ecologics is designed as a recipe book for home making.
Design by Johan Ahlbäck, 2019.
Design and Nature: A partnership
This book explores the possibility of new relationships between design and nature.
In a dominant understanding of design as an agent for economic growth, nature has been conceptualised as a resource for humans to control and use. What kind of relations between design and nature can instead lead to stable earth systems and thriving biodiversity? The book’s twenty five chapters stretch the imagination of design and nature partnerships – by including more than human species in the design process (bees and trees, fish and fungi) and profoundly challenging how we know in design – to place a bigger emphasis on direct experience with nature, placing emotional and spiritual engagement in dialogue with science, and drawing on both historical and futures perspectives. Overall this book decentres humans in the design process and starts imagining is as a complex web across many species.
Design and Nature: A partnership is an edited book by Kate Fletcher, Louise St Pierre and Mathilda Tham, designed by Katherine Gillieson, published by Earthscan/Routledge, 2019.
Design and Nature: A Partnership.
Design Katherine Gillieson, 2019. Photo Mathilda Tham, 2024.
Dirty Design (or A Bloody Mess): In Celebration of Life Affirming Design
This text grew from observations during a camping trip in the forest when I started to connect my own discomfort with and fear of ‘untamed’ life (such as an ant crossing my foot) to an urge to control and bring order to life. Design as control manifests itself in design of homes that hide the messiness of everyday life – unruly food stuff, toys and clothes – behind pristine doors. At a different scale, design as control manifests in mega tools to manage complexity by categorising and quantifying it. Understood in this ways, design is not only a tool that can kill nature, but a tool that can kill the nature of nature: i.e. what emerges, what is messy – and what is also awe inspiring.
I propose that another way to engage with the inevitable complexity, messiness, unpredictability of nature and of life itself, is to approach it with curiosity and joy, from within. Instead of seeking clarity through externally exerting control and seeking an overview, we might find stability through a deeper engagement where we are – getting our hands dirty.
Chapter in Design and Nature: A partnership edited by Kate Fletcher, Louise St Pierre and Mathilda Tham, published by Earthscan/Routledge, 2019.
Dirty Design (or A Bloody Mess).
Photo Mathilda Tham, 2024.
Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan
The Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan is a radical invitation to business, governance, media, education, research and citizens to put earth first. Earth Logic takes the conversation about fashion and un/sustainability, straight up to the highest strategic level of the underlying logic guiding fashion. It proposes Earth Logic – what is logical or makes sense for a healthy planet and social justice instead of the logic of economic growth, which has driven constantly shorter lead times, lower prices and higher volumes, at the cost of people and the Earth.
Earth Logic is an action research plan because there is no time to do research first and then act; and is a plan to provide advanced starting points. Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan consists of three parts: I. Explicit values context – to plan and evaluate work, II. Research checklist – to keep work on a radical track, III. Holistic landscapes – places for beginning radical work.
Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan, by Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, first published in English 2019, also exists in Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and is free to download.
Earth Logic cover and landscape of local.
Illustrations by Katelyn Toth-Fejel and Anna Fitzpatrick for Earth Logic, 2019.
Photo Mathilda Tham, 2024.
Metadesigning Design Research: How can designers collaboratively grow a research platform?
When I arrived as a Professor of Design at Linnaeus University, a key responsibility was to develop a research platform. I decided that the intended direction of our work (sustainability) needed to be reflected in how we were working, and invited all staff into a joyful, tricky, generative, enlightening process of cocreation. This text – written with 11 members of staff – shares the two-and-a-half-year-long journey. It includes how we physically built a research platform – a unique shelf – in order to root our research in practice, how we encountered friction as the academic institution typically foregrounds theoretical knowledge, as well as support as we invited different disciplines and surrounding society on our journey.
Paper in proceedings from Design Research Society conference in Brighton, 2016. Free to download.
A physical manifestation of a research platform co-created by staff.
Photo Anders Klippinge, 2016.
The Futures of Futures Studies in Fashion
This chapter takes a meta perspective on fashion forecasting, which can be understood as a branch of Futures Studies. Typically fashion forecasting, or prediction, is directed at new styles, colours, materials. The chapter proposes that fashion forecasting can also be used strategically to radically advance sustainability work in the fashion sector 1) by offering a framework for systemic and systematic scenario building at the nested levels of products, systems and paradigms; 2) and by offering a zone in the fashion industry for much needed reflection, explorations of values, imagination and envisioning. The chapter outlines a process informed by peace and reconciliation studies to support acknowledgement and healing of the deep wounds that fashion has caused as it reconfigures itself to contribute to social justice and stable earth systems. The approaches can be described as metadesign, a design of design itself, seeds for change, a collaborative and inclusive design process.
The Futures of Futures Studies in Fashion is a chapter in Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion edited by Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, published by Routledge, 2015.
Futures of Futures Studies in Fashion takes a metaperspective on forecasting
informed by, for example, futures scholar Ziuaddin Sardar.
Photo Mathilda Tham, 2024.
Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion
The ambition behind this handbook was to provide a resource that takes an ambitious systemic and holistic perspective on fashion and sustainability, genuinely acknowledging the entangled social, cultural, natural and economic systems, multiple temporalities and geographies that a serious change agent will face. The book also acknowledges the multiple roles and disciplines embedded in fashion – including factory workers and media, independent designers and multinational brands, as well as the potential to direct change at levels of materials and products, systems and infrastures, and even paradigms. We invited the authors of the book’s 28 chapters into a co-creative process to feed into the themes of the book, and proposed different paths the reader might take through the book – allowing, for example, post-growth fashion to be in dialogue with gender and open source.
Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion edited by Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, published by Routledge, 2015.
Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion.
Photo Mathilda Tham, 2024.
rem Ipsum...Photo Mathilda Tham, 2024.
Lucky People Forecast
Lucky People Forecast – a systemic futures perspective on fashion and sustainability is my PhD thesis from Goldsmiths, University of London, completed in 2008.
Lucky People Forecast is the proposal to reposition fashion designers, as well as other fashion stakeholders, as agentic and powerful futures makers who can through their unique skills, interests and networks make a fashion system that contributes to social justice and a healthy planet. I worked in co-creation with many fashion stakeholders – from big and small companies, media, trade organisations, fashion education as well as citizens in Sweden and the UK to develop the Lucky People Forecast approach. It is a methodology to work with change through a combination of design, futures studies and systems thinking. You can download the whole thing here.
Thesis with matchbox for scale.
Photo Mathilda Tham, 2024.