Pocket Notes: Holistic Sustainability for Creative Micro-Businesses

Design Fellow: Karishma Kusurkur
Co-Investigator: Gillian Colhoun

Challenge

Many micro-businesses in Northern Ireland are eager to adopt regenerative and sustainable practices but lack access to tailored knowledge, practical guidance, or peer-led examples. Traditional support models often miss the nuance, rhythm, and lived realities of these hyper-local, time-poor, smaller-scale creative enterprises.

Approach

Design Fellow, Karishma Kusurkar, conducted a series of 12 in-depth interviews with creative micro-businesses across Northern Ireland, including Rathlin Island capturing their challenges, values, working conditions, and sustainability aspirations. These conversations centred relational, situated storytelling over metrics prioritising spaces like coworking studios in bank buildings to converted farm sheds to active retail spaces providing insight through context, conversation, and mutual trust.

Outcomes

The interviews generated a nuanced qualitative dataset highlighting the lived experience of creative micro-businesses. They revealed common themes around time scarcity, emotional labour, values-led branding, and desire for realistic sustainability pathways. These insights will underpin the development of a co-designed sustainability toolkit tailored for small-scale, place-based practice and a space for microbusiness owners to connect and share knowledge.

Learnings

Informal, trust-based interviews highlighted richer insights than traditional surveys. Working with people in their space opened up reflections on identity, compromise, and creative resilience. The process revealed that sustainability support must acknowledge not only economic and environmental concerns, but also emotional, sensory, and relational dimensions of micro-business life.

Impact

The fellowship has laid the foundation for a new kind of sustainability support grounded in lived experience, cultural nuance, and design empathy. By documenting and amplifying the voices of creative micro-businesses, the fellowship is shifting narratives around what counts as knowledge, and who gets to shape regenerative futures whilst providing more realistic and achievable pathways to a more sustainable and regenerative future.