Conference Agenda

Vietnam’s textile and apparel industry, one of the world’s largest garment exporters, is under growing pressure to shift from labour-based to design-led and sustainable business models. However, applying Western co-design frameworks within the hierarchical and production-driven context of large enterprises reveals significant cultural and structural constraints. Drawing on in-depth interviews and reflexive journaling, this paper reports findings from two phases of an ongoing project and examine how design participation is understood and enacted across Vietnam’s fashion eco-system, contrasting the relational practices of micro and small enterprises with the fragmented processes of large manufacturers. It introduces đồng-design, a culturally situated approach grounded in the Vietnamese value of togetherness, as a systemic way of designing collaboration across scales. By articulating đồng-design as both a conceptual and practical framework, the study contributes to pluralistic understandings of systemic design and highlights pathways for building design capacity and collaborative agency.