Background: The production of textile crafts requires resources and skilled artisans. In modern times, textile crafts sold in the global market are often made through collaboration involving artisans and profit, social and non-profit enterprises with aim to globalize the aesthetic or styling, structural aspects, and marketability of the crafted product. Collaboration is understood here as two or more enterprises working together towards common profit ideologies, values or goals. Textile craft producer Jordan River Foundation’s (JRF) and IKEA’s Social Entrepreneurship Initiative; collaboration creates home furnishing collections through design and product development, that aim to promote and develop so called local crafts-based economy. Need: In a collaboration, the textile craft producer plays the role of leveraging its resources, and keeps the capability to test its making in the design development and implementation process of craft products. It is thus this need to know of how these collaborative relationships function from a producer’s perspective, emphasizing on the most value adding factor of the design development process. Purpose: The purpose of the study was to investigate and understand primarily from the craft producer Jordan River Foundation’s point of view, the collaborative design development and implementation process with IKEA. Method: The study is a qualitative, narrative, analysing the data and experience from a two-week participatory field study at Jordan River Foundation. Conclusion: As exposed through the collaboration, with IKEA, JRF is challenged with working with cost efficient process of the usage of materials and techniques in design development and methods of craft production, and at the same time maintains its niche as a craft producer. The study concludes that collaborative design efforts in textile crafts, uplifts and enhances, tangible and intangible values. Within the perspective of textile management, the knowledge of collaborative design development in textile crafts interconnects new spaces and turns skill knowledge into a force of competitive advantage for the participating organisations.

This master’s thesis aims to identify triggers for innovation and creativity both from theory and from practise in the context of an automotive manufacturing company. The identified triggers are then re-interpreted and used to design prototypes which aim to visualise, support, and stimulate incremental innovation. Through a design process, the prototypes are co-designed together with a group of participants from the automotive manufacturing company to explore and understand how to create prototypes that are relevant to the context. The result indicates that the prototypes do not only visualise, support, and stimulate incremental innovation but that they can also function as a foundation for radically design and develop new approaches to work; such as incorporating design thinking and a more diverse, inclusive, and creative approach to idea generation. Ultimately, the prototypes can be incentives for changing the organisation in the way the employees work and approach tasks, but the employees must learn how to use the prototypes to utilize them in the most efficient way. / Den här mastersuppsatsen har som mål att identifiera triggers av innovation och kreativitet, både hämtade ur teorin men också praktiken inom fordonstillverkningskontexten. Dessa triggers används sedan i designprocessen för att designa prototyper för ändamålet att visualisera, stötta och stimulera inkrementell innovation. Designprocessen involverar co-design tillsammans med en grupp från företaget för att utforska och bättre förstå hur vi kunnat skapa prototyper som är relevanta för kontexten. Resultatet indikerar att prototyperna inte enbart visualiserar, stöttar och stimulerar inkrementell innovation utan också kan fungera som en grund att designa och utveckla nya, radikala tillvägagångssätt att arbeta på inom organisationen; exempelvis genom att införliva design thinking och i högre grad mångfaldiga, inkluderade och kreativa sätt att ta sig an ide generering. Prototyperna kan vara drivsporrar till att förändra organisationen i det sätt de anställda arbetar på och tar sig an uppgifter men de anställda måste lära sig att använda prototyperna för att kunna dra nytta av dem på bästa sätt.

This project aims to challenge preconceptions of mental health and attempts to conceptually dissect the popular phrase “mental health is a luxury”. The dissection is grounded on a theoretical background related to the inefficiencies of the health care system, advocacy movements of health care rights, material culture and luxury consumption, in order to conceptualize design strategies for sociocultural change.The concept challenges the perception of mental health care as luxury through the invitation of other mental health sufferers into a collaborative co-design space that generates information about their subjective lived experiences and needs, through participatory and empathic design methods. Jewelry has been selected as a design medium that combines possibilities of self-expression, involvement in co-crafting, similarities to other devices for self-regulation and preconceptions of status. The socioeconomic issues of the accessibility of mental health care reveals inequalities related to social status, and jewelry with its historical connotation as a social status symbol is used in this project as a critical tool to portray and question the correlation between socioeconomic privilege and mental health care. The collaborative process of co-designing and translating real people’s needs into customized jewelry works as an attempt to redefine jewelry as a manifestation of human needs and to cultivate mental health sufferers’ agency and power towards their own health.

Energy plays a significant role in a country’s development. Usage of an improved stove that produces biochar could help to reduce the pressure of deforestation, amend soil productivity, and provide cleaner technology for cooking. In Kwale, a county located on the south coast of Kenya, firewood is still used as the primary cooking fuel followed by charcoal. This research aims to investigate the improvements for a Top-litUpDraft (TLUD) biochar-producing gasifier stove, which the users aspired through co-designing. Transformative mixed methods were used as the research design to empower the users’ involvement in the biochar and smallholder farmers in Kenya – improved use efficiency of farm-level organic resources in relation to energy, crops and soil project. Triangulation was used to process the collected data through structured user observations, a focus group discussion, and a semi-structured interview. Between two stakeholders, TLUDgasifier stove users and the manufacturer, there was a difference of opinion for the main priority. Ease of use was the main concern for the users while the manufacturer put forward energy efficiency. Further, the users desired for an increase in the stove’s dimension as its capacity to produce biochar would increase.

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