New Work: ‘Material Change’
Founded by the designer Eve Blossom, Lulan Artisans is a pioneering for-profit social venture that designs, produces and markets contemporary textiles made by over 650 weavers, dyers, spinners and finishers in small workshops in Cambodia, India, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Lulan provides workers with fair wages and benefits, creates jobs, preserves artisanal skills and promotes economic stability. The company is built on a sustainable business model that has the potential to change the world.
Pentagram’s Paula Scher and her team have designed Material Change: Design Thinking and the Social Entrepreneurship Movement, a new book by Blossom out now from Metropolis Books. In the book, Blossom chronicles the development of Lulan Artisans, describing her travels to weaving communities in Southeast Asia, how she came to know the artisans and their designs, and how she built a thriving partnership with local co-operatives. At the same time, she describes Lulan as a holistic design solution with a grassroots, bottom-up approach that can be applied to other culturally sustainable enterprises, and introduces other pioneers of social entrepreneurship, including Muna AbuSulayman, Patrick Awuah and Joi Ito. The designer Yves Behar contributes the book’s foreword.
Scher’s design for the book evokes the beautiful, highly graphic patterns of the textiles. Chapters are announced in spreads that pair images of Lulan fabrics with colorful numerals formed of thread-like lines. The book weaves together Blossom’s own story of Lulan, her observations about the design thinking behind social business, and accounts by other social entrepreneurs. These bodies of text are laid out horizontally on parallel paths, one in black, the other in color, running across chapter spreads, like the weft of a fabric. Evocative full-bleed photographs of the craftspeople, their communities and the weaving process showcase the artisanship behind the textiles.
The book features a clothbound cover and contains ribbons for marking pages. The typeface Amasis is used for the book’s cover, headers and chapter numbers; body copy is set in Karmina.
Project Team: Paula Scher, partner-in-charge and designer; Michael Schnepf and Res Eichenberger, designers.