Designer-customer relationships: what role do they play in contemporary Australian textile design?

The slow design movement is encouraging designers to build stronger relationships between the designed artefact and the customer they design for. Together with design activism and design thinking, the new design paradigm is moving away from 'please and delight' product to emotionally durable design. With this shift in mind, the relationship and level of connectedness between designers and customers is critical and needs to be better understood. How do designers, specifically textile designers, operating in the commercial mass market sector 'connect' with their customer? How does this relationship contrast to niche market designer-makers? A series of interviews were undertaken with 6 Australian based textile designers as part of a larger ongoing research project that is investigating ways for textile designers to encourage more meaningful connections between people and material possessions. This paper examines and analyses the designer-customer relationship in reference to current academic literature on the topic of slow design and designer-customer relationships