Towards engaged ecologies,  re-story-ation and Tina-led cosmologies.

Connecting maker communities, Tagbanua weavers and craft makers of Tina, Aborlan, Palawan and the online community of the Master Regenerative Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL

by Judith van den Boom

Karubwaten it Tina, is a craft project initiated by Life College with the Tagbanua weavers and craft makers of Tina, Aborlan, Palawan, the Philippines and strives towards engaged ecologies, connecting ecosystems, communities and a new generation that links craft, learning and futures in a regenerative way.  Karubwaten, meaning made by hands, is a community conversation using weaving as the language of knowing and constructing living relationships between land and the Tagbanua weavers.

Our online community from the Master Regenerative Design, Central Saint Martins, (UAL) was been invited into the journey of co-design to interweave craft and regenerative ethics from around the world.  Karubwaten it Tina gives agency to explore the meaning of ‘becoming collective’ and built a deeper understanding how making is integral to life and the future of the Tina ecology. The exchange formed through active engagement in online workshops where Tagbanua community gathered in Palawan to meet online with our MARD community. The first steps of the process was a process of welcoming each other in a conversation of exchange, introducing our ecosystems and the ways of how we practice community in the places we live.

(image, collaborative weaving Tina)

In the Karubwaten project it was central to slow down the design process in order to reconfigure what is means to participate and recognise the importance of building connection through communal making and storytelling.  As participants we all come from individual stories and contexts. We are shaped by passed-on knowledge and our local circumstances. The way we understand the world is often led by the stories told. Weaving restoration is in first place a process of taking time of listening to each other in order to arrive in a deeper understanding of our ecosystems. Learning about local species and life processes allows to grow new connection and a process of re-story-ation (Kimmerer, 2013) Activating a process of deep listening and making was key for our online community to learn from the Tagbanua weavers and craft makers and connect with the stories from place and species. The project identified a critical discussion point on who takes charge in a design process, on what questions are asked, and what stories are shared. What is just, equal and right for the process and aims of the community? Who steers the story of place? The Tagbanua weavers shared a Tina-led process through making and how it is passed on for generations and impacted  how they live with ecosystems in place. The design processes and hierarchy of doing reversed, shifting away from the model where design proposes from the outside and move towards understanding the sensitivity of place, people and materials and growing from the inside.

Co-design from an indigenous Tina-led perspective shifts the process of design, and starts with being invited into a community and built commons through the making of relations. The Tina-led process taught MARD what storytelling means, shifting away from our projected assumptions and how stories ‘are the hands’ that make the work. The hands that carry knowledge from generation to generation. The Tina-led process created space for being the other and set in the curiosity of learning about the other.

Co-design talks about a participatory process where everyone is involved, yet the Tina-led processes shifted more into a companion-designing methodology, where as online community we would work and nurture the stories and skills that are already in place. Shifting from co-designing, a mode of active proposing, to a form of ‘companioning’, of active presence through sharing experiences that leadcross-pollination and conversation. In the process of ‘companioning’ everyone takes part as a listener, and through material experiences the process enables a deeper integral understanding of place, people and possibility. (Mang, Reed 2012)

The companioning process respects the human, local, cultural and ecological understandings of place and works with the story of place. As online ecosystem we could share what making means for us, how our community lives with the land, connecting harvest, food, and how we built relations. Through making by hands, the MARD online community could tap into place, by making rice packages (puso-puso), harvesting grasses at home, and connect online in collective weaving exploration with the women sharing how they weave.
(image online weaving puso-puso )

The process was a rhythm of ecological and material stories connecting our various locations; stripping hazel in Cumbria, indigenous dyeing processes in Brazil, weaving bark shoes from Russia, exploring Pandan weaving through Chinese traditional knotting, translating Pandan through embellishments and exploring weaving through the lens of Pandan, Yantok, Hazel, Birch, Urucum and other local biodiversity lenses that we connected from.

Through the frameworks of permaculture and relational learning the project process guided how we understand growing, harvesting, dyeing and creation with Pandan and Yantok, plant species who became learning agents connecting local knowledge and ecological representation. Interweaving communities coming from different cultural, political, economic and ecological backgrounds brings in the deeper questions and reflection on ethics of learning and listening. How we understand these ethics through the lens of regenerative design?

(image, online meeting sessions)
For our MARD community this was a learning process and reflection on the role of design.  Who is the designer in the process, who decides, designs, and frames the narrative? How can we shift from the who to a more centric mode of creation? In regenerative design the narrative of place is in the hands of the community, of the people and species in place and as the external ‘species’ we are forming an ecotone, a space where species meet, where nature, culture and knowledge merges interpretations and build resilience. As regenerative practitioners we are part of temporal ecotones and nurture the (bio)diversity in place. (East, 2019) The Tagbanua weavers and craft makers of Tina met the MARD online community in a digital ecotone, create a space for different makers to meet, entering with a shared curiosity to learn from the life experience of others. 

A living system is not static and the ecosystem of Palawan and the Tina community has lived for generations with the continuous evolving relationship, relying on the ecological health to sustain human communities and local economies. So, how we can learn as online community from a Tina-led cosmology? The Tagbanua weavers and craft makers of Tina show the importance of being situated in our processes, in how we are human, in how we shape our communities and build in spaces for plural voices, extending the table of stakeholders and processes in how we design. The Karubwaten project informed a dialogical reflective process that was not shying away from the sensitivity and ethics of place and making that were produced through our meetings.

(image, sharing online ecosystems)

As humans we live in entangled relationships with our ecosystems, and relationships with how we view the ecology needs to change as nothing can live in isolation, not even the human, as we are part of the ecology. Our human species are part of a living planet, we impact local ecosystems, and have impacted in most colonial and unethical practices in our past and present. So, how do we move forward and use regenerative design to redirect the story of possibility, connection and local thriving ecosystems? The Karubwaten project defined a more attentive and intuitive practice, shifting from aims to deliver products to entering first into processes of learning, and building relations as humans, as makers, as species, breaking down the barriers through collective hands and sharing local ways of seeing and learning from the ecosystems around us.

Working with a place-based relational ethos and ethics asks to build authentic relations from reciprocity through deep listening, observing and un-making. Learning from situated regenerative relations teach design practice about the complexity of interrelations and create space to identify new terms of engagement and exchange. As the Tina community shared weaving and making, our online community listened into ways of practicing and new understandings of how we interweave relations, ideas and dialogues in the making of design.

Mang, P., Reed, B. (2012). Designing from place: a regenerative framework and methodology, Building Research & Information

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Gary Nabhan, in Braiding Sweetgrass Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions.

East, M. (2019). "Maximising the Edges of Natural and Human Systems: The Case for Sociotones" Sustainability 11, no. 24: 7203. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11247203

Weaving shared values?

by Dr Britta Boyer

How do you weave shared value into life through remote learning[s] with a virtually created studio space between the Tina Weaving Community [situated in the mountain ranges of Central Palawan] and a small multi-located team from (UAL) MA Regenerative Design?


(Figure 1, Authors experimenting with the weaving of values.

Some contexts:
I was invited as a guest towards the end of a two-year project to consider the ethics of interaction through weekly virtual meetups to weave my understanding of this complex value chain. In observing [with the UAL team] and the Tina weaving community creative processes, gaining insights into the cultural and historical context of their weaving practices and seeing the between spaces of interculturality, I reflected upon three things: (1) what does it mean to radically listen to the remote community and understand their needs within the exchange, (2) how do we truly dispel the [unequal] tensions through democratic dialogue, how do you genuinely embrace different ontological aesthetic-moral assumptions (3) how to create an ethics and politics which are both generous and receptive, as well as move beyond current socio-political and economic systems based on extraction and inequalities to create viable alternatives. Daniel Wahl (2018) describes the alternatives as life-sustaining societies that aim to stop further damage and seek to look with new eyes. In my own work, I describe transpositions or a position change (Boyer, 2022). The ethical position change here would be to create value in a regenerative supply chain where suppliers become more like business partners. Is the collaboration ready for that level of responsibility? It requires a commitment to increase awareness of unfair trading exchanges within communities so they may push back against the repressive global 'free markets' of today and, at the same time, reduce dependence.

Reflection by Bruna Cerasi,

São Paulo, Brazil

I had already had exchange experiences with other traditional communities, especially the Guarani and the Yawalapiti indigenous communities in Brazil, the country where I was born and live. The experience of online collaboration in this type of format was something new for me and it impressed me positively in terms of engagement with the community and outside collaborators. It was fascinating to see the community's ability to weave materials and their relationship with the community itself and its meanings.

One of the objects that fascinated me most was one presented by the community and described by them as made in the shape of a heart, (puso-puso) which, in the way I heard it, has a relationship with the way they see food and its relationship of affection and nutrition.

(heart-shaped puso-puso package)

In fact, food was a very interesting part of the exchange as it was both a moment of connection and discovery of the different contexts of each person who participated in the collaboration.
The food really seemed to speak a lot in terms of place and connection, but the woven objects had a relationship beyond food.

It was very interesting to notice the similarities in terms of processes, material development and weaving skills between them and the indigenous communities in Brazil while I was sharing some videos from local weaving communities with them.

(Brazilian indigenous weaving skills)

It seemed to me that there might be similar worldviews influencing behaviours and social aspects among many of the traditional communities but also the abiotic similarities may have an influence.

The fact that both Brazil and Philippines are in in a tropical climate make them have biotic similarities such as, for example, the presence of the annatto, which proved to be, during exchange, an element present in both cultures and used for different meanings such as cooking and dying. Being in contact with such connected, motivated, and skilled people was an inspiring and enriching experience which I am mostly grateful for.

(sharing annatto)

Reflection by Miao Li, Arnhem, The Netherlands

It’s fascinating for me as a maker to see these skilled weavers and their work. With just one material and the simple principle of weaving, they created a variety of techniques, patterns, and forms. I truly admire the collaboration between the people, the plant life and the local ecosystem, which is very inspiring for me to rethink my position as a maker and my relationship with Earth.

(sharing weaving )

Reflection by Stanley McNulty, Cumbria, UK

Over the past few months, working with the Palawan weaving community has been a huge personal privilege. As a fellow maker, I found it particularly exciting to work with a thriving indigenous community with a passionate for preserving local craft skills, and material knowledge. This was something which I found we all had in common.

(sharing local ecosystems )

I felt hugely inspired by the ease at which the community worked with their materials. Literally, ‘growing’ these precious objects from the ground up.

(hazel  design process )
At the same time, in my own practice, I found working with the Pandan and Yantok hugely rewarding. I particularly enjoyed having the opportunity to experiment with them on my loom at home and sharing my practice working with Hazel. Overall, I’d like to think that the both ourselves and the community found this collaborative experience hugely rewarding!

(Maki Obara design hemp process )
(pandan dye process )

(bird weavier techniques informing weaving )

Learning weaving techniques, connections, food preferences, words, traditions of the Tina community and other participants of the project let me accept and re-connect to my own roots and different forms of co-existence. I'm in love with the idea of cultural transformation based on learning from non-human communities and human communities that didn't lose the contact with the environment.