Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the craft-rich region of Kutch, western India, and the historical sari weaving town of Maheshwar, central India, two institutes are providing design and business education to traditional artisans. These are Somaiya Kala Vidya (SKV) and The Handloom School (THS); they form case studies for my PhD research. SKV encourages students to focus on their traditional designs believing them to be their unique selling point, but to innovate upon these traditions making them relevant to contemporary markets. Graduates face challenges of balancing the maintenance of the traditional aspects of their craft, their identity and integrity, with urban and global market influences and demands. THS invites weavers from all over India and encourages them to become entrepreneurs to spread the education benefits in their community. However, having little capacity to focus on each students’ weaving heritage runs the risk of their practice becoming standardized as a big part of their market becomes fabric yardage for the high fashion industry. This paper will focus upon the experiences of some of the weaver-graduates of each institute, gathered from ethnographic research, to tell their story and highlight their successes and challenges. Drawing also upon the disciplines of craft development, anthropology, design history and education, this paper will explore the following questions: How does design education fit the local context? Who owns traditional and other designs? What is the value of craft from the viewpoint of the artisan-designer as well as that of the market? It also explores how traditional methods of learning to weave compare with learning and applying contemporary design concepts. I will provide an assessment of the effectiveness of these institutes in nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship, equipping artisans with the skills and confidence to make authoritative decisions in design partnerships and business transactions, and presenting handloom as a viable and desirable occupation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".