Bordado De Valors. Design-Oriented Actions to Support Paraguayan Crafts for Local Female Self-Determination

This paper presents the design actions and the results obtained in the project "Development of fashion products", a joint operation carried out by the Design Department, Milano Fashion Institute consortium and the IILA, Instituto Italo-Latinoamericano, based in Rome; aimed at creating a Training Course for trainers and local development activities, respectively in Paraguay, to understand, support and develop actions related to micro-entrepreneurship and women's self-determination. The aim of the project "Development of fashion products" was initially to create a training course for trainers from Latin America institution, especially for trainers from Instituto Paraguayo de Artesanía de Asunción, to strengthen the training activities already under way in the Institute. The course, held in Milan in two weeks through three macro themes: Fashion Design Management, Technologies and Merceology for Fashion, Design and Product Development - the latter in the form of a design workshop on research methodologies, organization and management of a fashion collection - with the aim of bringing participants to the modus operandi that today characterizes the development of a fashion product within the most prestigious Made in Italy brands. A second phase of the project focused instead on two international actions, in two municipalities of Paraguay, Pilar and Yataity, with the aim of achieving a co-design workshop with two groups of women artisans specialized in embroidery, to transmit to them the concepts of micro-entrepreneurship, female self-determination and improvement of female work in their communities. Through this field experience we can observe that creativity in design combined with the manual work and the ability of the artisans to know how to manipulate materials represents the expression of a society wish, able to understand the changes; today the object of market and consumption is not only the simple possession of a specific product but it is the experience, the “story” that the customer can live inside the object, according to values of the manufacture that create add value to the existence.