Shreya Mala

This project explores how traditional craft can inspire designers to engage with sustainable practice and slow, process-based making. The research in this project examines two areas of traditional South Asian woodblock printing: first, the ideologies behind the slow printing process as a low-impact, human-centred craft. The second area translate traditional South Asian motifs to communicate values of sustainability and intentionality. These motifs are redesigned into a contemporary visual language for this project, to communicate traditional philosophies of sustainability into a modern context. This project is intended inspire change in a designer’s practice by adopting processes and ideals of non-westernised crafting. The outcome is a series of woodblock-printed graphic forms, which I used to develop a “visual vocabulary”, that connects South Asian craft knowledge with environmental consciousness, showing how slow and grounded processes can inspire more sustainable ways of making and understanding.