A pathway from fashion designer to design anthropologist and founder of this cross-cultural, regenerative materials project, where arts-led research meets environmental action and social entrepreneurship.
Dr Britta Boyer (Project co-lead) is a UK-based design researcher with extensive lived and professional experience in Bali, Indonesia. Her practice spans design anthropology, regenerative craft, and community development, with a focus on relational and decolonial approaches. Britta’s research centres on material ecologies, kinship-based collaboration, and creative capacity building, developed through long-term partnerships with artisan and agricultural communities in Southeast Asia. She leads Kinship through Rice with her a transdisciplinary project supported by the British Council and Indonesian academic institutions, exploring post-harvest material futures and community empowerment through craft and ecological design.The shift from complex textile systems to regenerative practitioner has been a journey of deep listening, unlearning, and radically reimagining what innovation means in a world under pressure. It has required a shift in values and pace: from fast cycles and commercial outputs to slow knowledge, place-based collaboration, and the nurturing of care-centred design.
The problem of rice waste management and open field burning of rice straw leads to air, water, and land pollution, which is an enormous problem for the environment. Moreover, it contributes to climate change and increased ozone levels. This body of work now centres on the radical potential of agri-waste, not only as a material, but as a metaphor for overlooked stories, ancestral knowledges, and ways of being that are undervalued within dominant economic systems.
RICE (Regeneration, Innovation, Culture & Economy) serves as a curatorial lens rather than a silo and is a living, open-ended platform for learning, exchange, and continued co-creation between universities, designers, communities, and future generations of makers. It challenges extractive notions of research and documentation by centring reciprocity, cultural humility, and ecological justice. Ultimately, it embodies a model of design ecologies in action, where regeneration is not just a goal but a guiding ethic.