A shift to the use of more eco‐friendly products and production methods is not sufficient to reverse the negative impacts of the Anthropocene period. Irrational overconsumption and production patterns should be abolished and redesigned to remain within the Earth's carrying capacity. Over‐consumption in Turkey is a part of the problem. At the juncture of Europe and Asia, Turkey has a wide variety of consumer behaviors, ranging from conservative habits to shopping sprees, especially with the rapid transition to an open economy in developing cities with contemporized lifestyles. On the one hand, consumption and material culture have quickly diffused among the younger population, who have an important share in the demographic structure and who adopt new information technologies and follow global trends. On the other hand, sharing and collaboration are core elements of the established culture. With that notion in mind, Karsiyaka municipality and the alternative education cooperation BBOM Izmir organized a swap event. The aim of the research, was to discover the views of participants on sustainability and swapping as an alternative collaborative consumption method. The results of the interviews and observations from the swap event revealed the traces of personal and cultural values on the participants' perspectives on sustainability concept and swapping. The results also showed correlations and differences with the literature. The perceptions and expectations of local consumers about swap and the concept of sustainability are mismatched with what we profoundly need for our goal of sustainability.
IntroductionThe modes of production in informal economies in developing countries are highly dependent on social relationships, including apprenticeship and vocational training. 3 As a result, different design processes can be expected to emerge in informal economies. Such contexts can require a different understanding of artistry, "objecthood," labor, and time. Some designers in clustered craft contexts in Istanbul, a representative of informal economies in the world, develop strategies and embed their design knowledge in new processes in ways that are not addressed in "modernist" design education.The aim of this paper is to present how the encounter of designers and craftsmen 4 can create a genuine blend of practice that particularly stems from dialogical bonds as a new "designing" typology in informal contexts. Such bonds and the practices they engender simultaneously empower designers and local craftsmen, such as goldsmiths, stone setters, neon sign makers, inlayers, coppersmiths, and welders, in urban Istanbul neighborhoods.To explore these new processes, we undertook in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 14 trained professional designers and the master craftsmen who work with them in Istanbul. In this article we selected significantly representative excerpts from these interviews to illustrate how craftsmen and designers coax each other to be open and alert for opportunities that arise during the collaborative production or design process. The research also aims to understand the effects of the unplanned exposure of the traditional culture of "crafts" and the culture of "design" to one another in a context of non-Western modernity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.