Textile craft producer Jordan River Foundation’s collaborative design development with IKEA

Sammanfattning: 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.