Cultural Memory, an Asset for Design-driven Innovation within the Creative Industries Sector: Lessons for design education

Culture is gaining recognition globally as an important driver of sustainable development in the creative economy. The significance of the role of design and culture with the creative industries is under-researched, especially from the new emerging economies perspective. Therefore, designers need a framework which will guide them on how they can create sustainable, and innovative cultural sensitive products which reflect users’ identities. Co-designing from cultural memory is a new design approach which embeds users’ beliefs, expectations, and expressive values in products and services. The paper discusses two case studies which were conducted in Botswana within the creative industries. The aim was to study how designers imbued cultural memory factors into design features. The paper developed a culture-centred design model after carefully studying how designers identify, transform and imbued cultural memory factors into innovative glocalised products that have local meaning and a global appeal