Abstract:

This article focuses on determining the active roles of the designer in the new product development process by cooperating with local communities and designers in the context of craft and sustainability in women’s cooperatives structured as enterprises, businesses, and production in Turkey. While studies of empowering crafts through design take place in the literature, there is a lack of information about how the process can be handled by designers. The lack of clarity in the stages of a collaborative design process in identifying design interventions for the empowerment of crafts in women’s cooperatives reveals the necessity of defining the roles of designers in the process. The new product development process with the cooperation of designers and craftsmen, in which women who are organized under the roof of the cooperative and who carry out local production, are discussed with the example of a women’s cooperative. A two-week workshop consisting of three applications was held with six members of the Karabük Ureten Eller Cooperative. The workshop was documented with audio recording, field notes, online group discussions, and photographs. The researcher, who was a designer during the workshop, designed a process that facilitates the action of the participants in the new product development process, ensures collective work and allows the participants to visualize the end product.

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