Visualising value chains
Perks, Sue (2014) Visualising value chains. In: Vision Plus 2014, 4-5 September 2014, designforum, Vienna, Austria. (Unpublished)
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This paper described how transformation can work in a contemporary context using the original method created by the Isotype Institute in Vienna in 1925, which was developed and extended by Marie Neurath in her many books visually explaining complex concepts to children from 1945 to the early 1970s. This was seen to particular effect in her work in West Africa in 1956, where she explained the importance of voting.
A key challenge to the efficacy of ethical fashion and textiles lies in communicating issues and challenges to those actors towards the bottom of value chains (garment factory workers, homeworkers, tribal crafts makers or micro entrepreneurs in the developing world). In many cases, brands, government & NGO programmes are focused on engaging such producers in fashion supply chains, largely women, who, while remote from the markets at the supply, may be responsible for a key element of the process of creating value through interpreting design, colour, and technique. Design or technical training can often play an important role in both gender and in wider social empowerment and management of funds generated by trading activities often directly supports community and infrastructural development.
Communication is often inhibited by two key issues – low or non existent literacy levels among producers whose technical skills may be well developed or by the confusion caused by the use of multiple languages in remote tribal areas in some developing countries) a workshop to engage crafts women may draw on a relatively small geographical region, but include 3 or 4 local languages, an obstacle to effective and timely delivery of training or workshopping. 'Visualising Value Chains’ aims to develop a visual tool that can effectively show what a value chain looks like, and what the challenges, limitations and opportunities might look like for an actor in a remote or contained section of that supply chain. It would involve the evolution of pictographic outputs to define methodologies and tools to support businesses, governments and NGO's who are active in “bottom up” development to support ethical fashion objectives through participatory research, training and dissemination of value chain information within sustainability and social responsibility programmes.
The tool for visually explaining the value chain is in the process of being designed using language-free explanation methods, through the collaboration of a sustainable fashion/business expert and a graphic designer. It will build on the interests of the team – which lie in sustainable fashion and the visual explanation of facts (transformation).
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