'The only lasting truth is change.' So says Lauren Olamina, the protagonist of Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) – a novel exploring social and environmental collapse in a dystopian 2025. It is a tough read, but it offers ways of thinking, being and knowing that might start to answer the question that has become a guiding light for my work and the subject of this column – Can craft save the world?

It was an intentionally provocative question and, in answering it, my focus has been on handcrafted objects, so far. Every time I talk about craft as part of the solution to the environmental crisis, I get the same question – How does it scale? My answer is usually that it doesn’t. Capitalism, consumerism and colonialism are what got us into this mess – craft’s small scale, materiality and locality are part of its appeal. Perhaps there’s a better answer because, as any maker will tell you; first – yes, craft can save the world and second – there’s more to craft than objects. Craft is not just a way of making. It too is a way of thinking, being and knowing.

'Design thinking'一the prevailing model in our industry for the past few decades—offered a simple six-step (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test, implement) methodology. It promised to bring accessibility and collaboration to what had been a 'black box' process. Its reliance on the humble and ubiquitous Post-It note made it feel approachable, replicable and flexible, promising to shift design from something reserved for professionals creating products, buildings and spaces to a transformative practice that anyone who took a two-day course could use to solve some of our biggest problems.

However noble its intentions and sound its theory, it didn’t quite live up to the hype. As Pentagram partner Natasha Jen wrote in an article, Design Thinking is Bullshit, "It has garnered into a cult that naively believes that it can create impactful change in larger systems via a reductive method.” And even that reductive method is rarely applied comprehensively. “You didn’t talk to anyone who works in a school, did you?”, Was the question that occurred to Kyle Conforth when she visited IDEO, one of the originators of the approach in 2011. The director of The Edible Schoolyard Project was initially excited by the seemingly collaborative framework, but the ideas generated quickly concerned her. “They were not contextualised in the problem at all,” she told MIT Technology Review last year.

Practitioners not only neglected the ‘empathise’ stage, as Conforth noted but often handed back the ‘test’ and ‘implement’ phases to the organisations that had hired them. This removed the intended feedback loop and created a linear process done to or for people rather than with them. Commodified and (mis)applied within a capitalist, consumerist and colonialist context, design thinking’s innovation became performative and its novel ideas naive and immaterial in context.

But it has another critical shortcoming. When woodworker-turned-theorist David Pye distinguished craftsmanship from ‘ordinary manufacture’, he coined the terms ‘workmanship of risk’ and the ‘workmanship of certainty’ – and linear design thinking could be categorised as the latter. Despite ‘dancing with ambiguity’ being among its core principles一even when all six steps are given due care and attention一its decisions are made upfront. The dance ends before implementation begins, or in Pye’s words, “The quality of the result is exactly predetermined before a single saleable thing is made.” There is no scope for what comes next.

The problem is that we live in a VUCA world. The acronym stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and provides the context for environmentalism. Or as Olamina put it, “The only lasting truth is change.” This means that products, buildings, spaces一or solutions to the climate crisis一reached using linear design thinking quickly become irrelevant.

What we need is a more inclusive and emergent approach. Tired of seeing design showcased as objects on literal pedestals in sterile white spaces, product designers Andu Masebo and Mikey Krzyzanowski tried something different for the London Design Festival in September. Responding to the theme "The Practice of Learning" set by Jane Withers Studio for the Brompton Design District, visitors to their Making Room were invited to construct the space around them using wooden offcuts and a simple bracket – learning, not just by listening and reading, but by doing. “Spaces like this are missing in London,” said Krzyzanowski. “There’s so much energy that would come from a new generation of designers [if we gave them]… new entry points to design.” Over nine days, the furniture and product designs for the talks and workshop programme emerged around them as all design participants transformed into furniture designers. The space was only ‘finished’ when the festival ended.

I would like to propose an alternative to design thinking – more appropriate for our VUCA times – with the working title: ‘Craft thinking’. Because, in contrast to the workmanship of certainty, Pye defined craftsmanship and the ‘workmanship of risk’ by saying, “the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity and care with which the maker exercises as he works.” That ‘dance with ambiguity’ continues all the way through the making or implementation process. And if we bring in the notion of ‘the craft of use’一conceived by United Kingdom’s London College of Fashion’s Professor Kate Fletcher as “the cultivated, ordinary and ingenious ideas and practices that promote satisfying and resourceful use”一we can extend that dance into the context for which objects and ideas are intended.

So, what is ‘craft thinking’ and how does it work in practice? The truth is I don’t know yet. Ironically, my first instinct when envisaging this model was to empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test and implement; publishing only once I had a certain definition, accompanied by case studies exemplifying its application. Instead, I am challenging myself to explore using this emerging ‘craft thinking’ approach. I will show my workings, place them in context and welcome feedback and change, which feels risky. I already have a full-bodied insight into the (false) comfort offered by design thinking.

As well as Pye and Fletcher’s thinking, I may draw on ideas such as tacit knowledge, materiality and serendipity; Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy which in turn draws on Butler’s writing; Dori Tunstall’s work on decolonising design; Rosie Murphy’s definition of collaboration, Dave Snowden’s writings on craft in strategy and complex adaptive systems, Nora Bateson’s Warm Data approach to ‘trans-contextual understanding’, George Aye’s thinking around power and privilege in design, Kelly Ann McKercher’s co-design approach and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s integration of Indigenous and modern scientific ways of knowing – to name but a few. I am interested in the intersections of craft with other disciplines, what we can learn from nature and perspectives from times and places other than my own. I want to hear from you in the comments section too – how does this resonate? What have I missed? I will be working with the idea that ‘the only lasting truth is change’ so we may end up somewhere completely unexpected and move on from there. But that’s the beauty of craft thinking – the definition TBC.

Katie Treggiden is a craft, nature and sustainability writer and a qualified Blue Health Coach™ based in Cornwall, UK. In this monthly column with STIR, she explores a new approach to solving the environmental crisis that uses craft, rather than design, as its starting point.