Britta Boyer

Britta holds an MA in Sustainable Design from University of Brighton. Britta's MA produced a body of work which explored the intersections of design and geographical sciences through qualitative ethnographic research and visual methods which challenged design into new ways of seeing from both western and non-western-centric viewpoints.

She completed a BA in Fashion Design at Central St. Martins, London, in 1995 and was an early pioneer of the fashion sustainability movement in 1995 working with post-consumer denim waste for her own brand earth 33 and was the founder of Green Ginger Noodle House in Bali, Indonesia.

Her most recent industry experiences were curating and project managing vast retail experiences for the British brand, Religion Clothing, in Indonesia. Her achievements have been substantiated by industry awards and multiple work experiences across the creative industries as well as developing educational pedagogy and live industry projects.

The most recent collaboration was with Wiki-Waste-Workshop (WWW) Nick Gant at the University of Brighton and Eco Bali, Indonesia. Britta's work and associated film served as a useful pedagogic tool in the process of engaging students with Bali as a ‘remote’ context to experience the social, cultural and environmental context of Bali as a place. 

The study aims to illuminate new possibilities for design education through epistemic decolonisation informed by the life stories and practices of a small group of designers in an international design community in Bali, Indonesia. Designers Beyonders are those who are cut across the west-non-west, industrial-non-industrial, north-south divides and seek to readdress the balance of power through their own practices, living the change needed to unsettle dominant ways of thinking in design. An interculturality in which knowledge ecologies emerge, through global mobility, that can assist in understanding the circulation of knowledge and an ecological perspective. The study illuminates the deep connection between physical mobility and mental imagination through the DBs practices. The participant stories and body maps are examples of material participation understood as feeling, thinking, and doing at the praxis of living. The work is critical and transdisciplinary. It is a qualitative, heuristic ethnographic approach seen through an anthropological design lens.

 Whilst the study did not entirely leave behind the notion of the West, the findings are a challenge to the dominant Western articulation of innovation through the perspectives of emergent practices and examples of designer sensibilities that can integrate and engage with a plurality. This study of DBs offers a way of conveying practices and visions of the future that move beyond the limits of Earthly politics of a dominant western worldview. Thus, creating new philosophical foundations from which to think, feel and act in design. A possibility of a world artisan of practices embedded with principles of enlivenment that links organic and sociocultural worlds through a synergy of biological, social, and political perspectives.

Britta's PhD is supervised by Professor Mikko Koria, Dr Laura Santamaria and Dr Amalia G Sabiescu

• Loughborough University Doctoral College studentship
• DRS Travel Bursary
• Santander Bank

Boyer, B., Wernli, M., Koria, M., & Santamaria, L. (2022). Our Own Metaphor: Tomorrow is Not for Sale. World Futures, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/02604027.2021.2014751

Wernli, M. & Boyer, B. (2021). ‘Breathful’ design in breathless times. Strategic Design Research Journal. Volume 14, number 01, January – April 2021. 175-186. https://doi.org/10.4013/sdrj.2021.141.15

Boyer, B. (2020) The story of ‘The Spirit of the Hibiscus’; worldmaking activities from Bali, in Leitão, R., Noel, L. and Murphy, L. (eds.), Pivot 2020: Designing a World of Many Centers - DRS Pluriversal Design SIG Conference, 4 June, held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2020.030

Britta Boyer (2019) Gender equality in tourism, by design, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2018.1564780

Boyer, B. (2018). Other ways of seeing: film as digital materiality and interlocutor for community-based tourism relationships in Bali. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 6(3), 276-296.

Britta has a new website coming soon.