Published date: Jan 08 2025

Journal Title: KnE Social Sciences

Issue title: The Bandung Creative Movement 2023 – Enhancing Collaboration In Arts, Design And Craft For Sustainable Creative Industries: Sustainable Design

Pages: 63 - 70

DOI: 10.18502/kss.v10i2.17878

Urmila Mohanum6@nyu.eduNew York University, New York

Stitchers, both trained and untrained in the design process, made tens of thousands of cloth masks during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. In doing so, they demonstrated how collaboration takes place, shaping relationships between diverse people as well as the way the pandemic was experienced. This chapter is based on an ethnography conducted between 2020 and 2022 where the different working processes and exchanges of skills and knowledge between designers and non-designers were observed. A shift in identity was apparent with formally-trained designers from the costume, theater, and film industry learning to work with uncertainty and lack of material inventory. Simultaneously, those stitchers who lacked formal design training were exposed to it by working with designers. That is, during a time of crisis, designers’ bricoleur capacities were apparent while their collaborators became quasi-designers. Such processes were co-creative means of leveraging solutions for unprecedented problems.

Keywords: bricolage, co-creation, collaboration, masks, pandemic

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