Alex Fasoli
PhD Project: Sustainability in the Making
Kingston University and the Crafts Council
Sustainability in the Making is a PhD project that explores how social craft contributes to building and enhancing cultures of sustainability, which are collective systems of knowledge and customs rooted in ecological values, behaviours, lifestyles, and norms.
Sharing and passing on skills and knowledge is an inherent aspect of craft tradition. Today, craftspeople also use their skills to promote, enhance, and give people tools to adopt more sustainable behaviours, to be more resilient in the face of environmental shifts, and to establish a more nourishing relationship with Nature.
Using an artistic approach that combines drawing, participant observation, and interviews, this PhD is an ethnographic study of craft programmes like the Green Maker Initiative and aims to better understand how they are contributing to generating eco-social change in the Southwest.
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Alex Fasoli is an Italian designer and illustrator based in Devon, UK.
Former architect, she has been involved in grassroots and community-driven design projects combining sustainability, artisanship, and local activism for over 15 years, contributing to initiatives in Italy, Peru, and Spain.
In 2019, she started a at Kingston University London, and in 2020 she moved to Devon. In her research she combines her passions — drawing, making, and sustainability — to explore how craft can be a vehicle for a radical, eco-social change.