Culturing Cultures
Umeå Institute of Design + Edinburgh Napier University
Biography
Leena Naqvi is a doctoral researcher at the Umeå Institute of Design, exploring how embodied food practices can inform critical and imaginative approaches to rethinking design. Her project, Culturing Cultures, looks at the South Asian practice of yoghurt-making as a lens to investigate gifting, reciprocity, and multispecies relations. Through the intersection of microbial and cultural narratives, her research repositions everyday rituals as sites of relational knowledge, offering new pathways for designing with care in a world after progress.
Introduction
Culturing Cultures invites viewers into a design research journey that reimagines design as a relational, ecologically entangled practice. Positioned at the intersection of storytelling, more-than-human entanglements, and experimental making, this PhD project challenges solution-oriented models by embracing design as an offering, a gift shaped by the relationships and conditions we nurture.
Using yoghurt-making as a central metaphor and method, the research explores multispecies co-creation in a world that moves beyond linear notions of progress. Microbes, materials, and environments become active collaborators in a design process that is reciprocal, and co-emergent. Fermentation is proposed not only as a technique but as a way of thinking about design itself : slow, responsive, and deeply relational.
This work contributes to conversations around relational design, foregrounding its poetic dimensions and ecological limits. What does it mean to design with rather than for? What unfolds when design is no longer about control, but care? Through workshops, storytelling, and lived experiments, Culturing Cultures cultivates a design practice grounded in interdependence and ecological stewardship.
Research
Culturing Cultures is a design research project that explores the entangled relationships between embodied food practices, environmental conditions, and more-than-human collaborators. At its heart lies a fascination with yoghurt-making, not just as a culinary tradition, but as a deeply relational, ecological, and cultural act. The project traces the early 20th-century South Asian practice of mailing yoghurt-smeared envelopes to diaspora communities in the UK. These dried flakes, once revived, would ferment new batches of yoghurt, enabling the continuation of microbial and cultural lineages across time and distance. These acts of care reveal how microbes, people, places, and memories co-create one another.
Through this lens, yoghurt becomes more than food. It is a living archive, a site of co-emergence, and a vessel of diasporic identity. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s notion of contaminated diversity, this research resists sanitized and universalist narratives of design. Instead, it embraces the messy, sensorial, and improvised processes that define everyday life. Yoghurt-making demands attentiveness, touch, and timing; it requires relational, embodied care. It is not a clean or modular process, but a feminist act of world-making and one that foregrounds the agency of microbes and the ingenuity of human hands working in tandem.
In South Asian diasporic households, yoghurt-making (dahi jamana) becomes a practice of cultural resilience. In colder climates and unfamiliar kitchens, jugaad/creative improvisation becomes essential: wrapping jars in blankets, using oven lights, or relying on sensory memory to know when the yoghurt has set. These acts are quiet forms of design, shaped by necessity, heritage, and embodied knowledges.
The research draws on interviews, visual ethnography, and design-led explorations. One yoghurt maker referred to the starter culture as “the witness”, a poetic metaphor that speaks to its role not only in fermentation but in bearing witness to diasporic life, adaptation, and survival. As the culture transforms milk into yoghurt, it also transforms spaces into homes, rituals into resilience, and microbes into kin.
In one exploration, homemade yoghurt was offered to new neighbours as a gesture of welcome. All three bowls returned with gifts, small acts of reciprocity that mirrored the fermenting logic of exchange and mutual care. Through such relational gestures, Culturing Cultures reimagines design as an offering, an ecologically rooted, multispecies practice of co-creation and belonging.
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