New product development through design: The case of craftswomen in mardin

This article investigates the change in the textile products made by handcraft practitioner women in Mardin located in southern Turkey when supplied with outside product design “expertise.” The group of participants of this research have no formal design education, yet they have been making products with techniques used to prepare trousseau pieces such as lace making, felt making, sewing and crocheting since they were teenagers. Now, they wanted to incorporate new ideas to their designs to reach contemporary markets. With this aim, the designer (also the author) constructed two workshop series because instead of giving new design ideas to the participants, the designer spent extensive amount of time during these workshop series to teach the participants how to develop new ideas without imposing her own ideas. In the course of two workshop series, the designer developed a facilitation procedure to enable practitioners to pursue self-suffcient design innovation aimed at reaching contemporary markets more effectively. In the workshops, interactions between a university-educated designer and traditional handcrafts practitioners focused on collaborative learning as well as process for new product development. The subsequent work produced by the handcrafts practitioners was deemed by a panel of independent academics and professionals to have improved when compared to their initial work. In addition to this, the procedures followed by the designer have been elicited from the documentation of the workshops. These procedures formed as a research-based guideline may be repeated by designers and researchers who are pursuing similar community economic development projects especially in developing countries where handwork is still practiced.