ABSTRACT
Most renewable materials in the developing world are part of languishing craft production-to-consumption systems, whose decline causes unsustainability at several levels. The lack of economic or productive skills, assets and options has led craftspeople to distress migrate to urban areas in search of wage labor. This distress migration, together with unprecedented urbanization causes: tremendous socio-economic unsustainability, and the loss of cultural capital due to vanishing crafts. Design shapes production-to-consumption systems and, thereby, sustainability. The possibility of shaping production-to-consumption systems towards sustainability challenges designers to create a counter-narrative that seeks to proactively actualize holistic sustainability. While each of the sub-mechanisms of the Rhizome Approach and all of its seven steps were well received by the workshop participants, the Sustainability Checklist received a high level of interest from the participants, both as the basis of a design and as an evaluation tool.
