I’m digging through a pile of fabrics. Around me, men are shouting in a melodic rhythm: “Everything for five Euros, for two, for one.” The market is winding down. Suddenly, a hand grabs the fabric I’m holding. It belongs to an elderly woman. She shakes her head and tells me it’s poor quality. From the same stack, she pulls out an embroidered pillowcase with a crochet hem. Five centimeters, she explains, can take up to an hour to make. I hand her the tablecloth I plan to buy. She turns it in her hands and tells me it is from a traditional Spanish household, likely over a hundred years old.
What I had seen as just another fabric turned into something else entirely. It became a carrier of skill, care and time. That moment stayed with me. It made me question how value is assigned, and what kind of stories we wanted our projects to hold.

This is just how we do it...
This question wasn’t entirely new. In fact, four months earlier, I had submitted my Bachelor's project built around similar ideas. The idea was to create, brand and sell an upcycled bag, focusing on the unique story of the fabric. Think: a theatre curtain from the national ballet, a fire blanket from the last mission, or a mine cloth from my grandma’s attic. By sharing these stories, people could connect more deeply with their bags, rethink their value, and keep them longer.
The project followed a familiar structure, which reflects how design today is often taught in a commercial framework: develop a product, give it a brand, bring it to market. At the time, that made perfect sense.

Confronted with new values
Everything shifted 2 months later, when I started a design residency with Distributed Design at Fab Lab Barcelona. A  new set of values came into play: openness, collaboration, regeneration, and ecosystemic thinking. Suddenly, the same project had to respond to a different context. The format clashed with the values. Open source wasn’t part of the plan. Neither was collaboration. And value was still defined in monetary terms.

Rather than simply starting over, the challenge was to redefine the concept from within. What happens when a concept built for the market is removed from its commercial logic, and reimagined to create value not through transactions, but through community? The answers wouldn’t come from theory, they had to be found in practice and in connection with others. 

Theory meets action
Research tells us to “go out and talk to people”, but it skips the part where it is damn difficult. Especially in a city where everything feels unfamiliar. Back home, existing networks and shared references make outreach easier. In a new place, hesitation grows. Every encounter becomes a risk. Or an opportunity.

In order to leave the studio, the process had to be set in motion. From Cold messages over Zoom interviews to studio visits all over the city.
This allowed me to learn about new fabric stories and get a glimpse into the local crafts community. There was the Mocador del Farcell, a traditional spanish tablecloth and the beautiful white hand-stitched pillowcases (the old lady at the market had consulted me on). One of my favorite visits was to a space called Lantoki, a brand that not only sells clothes, but also the patterns. Alongside this, their workshop space offers sewing machines to create your pieces or learn from more experienced Makers in workshops.
Any place I visited, people shared their experience in working in open design systems and encouraged me in the urgency and importance of my topic. Even better, they offered me input on how to improve my concept. Meaningful insights didn’t come from great questions, even though those are crucial too, but from being humble, listening, taking care and taking time. 

It all comes back to shared values
Throughout the process, I couldn’t help but notice how great my bag and project worked as a conversation starter. Like a tool, it allowed me to connect to the stranger community. They can relate to it because they know special fabrics for themselves.
That shift changed everything. The project no longer asked what can we sell, but what can we share?
It stopped being about value as a label and became about value as a relationship built through exchange.

In the end, what changed wasn’t just the format of the project. It was the use of design to shape encounters instead of objects. Because testing ideas in new environments doesn’t just improve them. It invites new perspectives and helps transform them into something more relevant, shared and grounded.