The Polyfloss factory recycles polypropylene into an easily transformable material

Droog Lab’s Material Furniture Fair suggests sustainable shops of the future

Miriam Ribul (TED Research Assistant) :

I was at the Milan Furniture Fair last month and I was definitely motivated to walk all those miles around the city as I encountered some great new work.

Some of most innovative work, as is often the case, was the student or graduate projects. A splendid example of this was the work from the RCA’s Paradise exhibition and Eindhoven’s ‘50 Graduate Projects that have a firm connection with life and the desire to make sense of it‘.  Many of these projects raised questions about time and scarcity of resources (material or economic), the will to solve local problems or to innovate in material futures or simply in human connections.

It was also great to see Milan’s furniture fair thrive with maker-labs and design activists. Domus presented workshops and an exhibition focused on DIY. Amongst the workshops was Openwear innovator and activist Zoe Romano (the same morning she ran a student workshop with our BA Textiles students via Skype), and her space was thriving with young designers passionate about her work.

Zoe believes that exploitation within the fashion and textile industry does not only lie within the supply chain, but also in un- or under-paid young designers. Her mission is a call for collaboration and small innovation hubs, where tools and workshop space is shared, and she aims to promote an alternative fashion system.

This was also demonstrated in the maker-lab of We Creative People. They had beautifully organised workshops, as well as special dinners with the locals. They had also created a great system of mapping the local area  to identify how a designer can improve a part of the city.

On the future of material, Droog Lab showcased The Material Fair of the Future, with real and fake ideas for how the future will be. The show questioned the environmental concerns of our time, and tried to subvert or enhance this with campaigns and fake advertisements of the future. Next to this, Droog exhibited real work which left the visitor unsure about where the line between reality and fiction was.

Becky Earley will present TED’s work at the Puma Sustainable Design collective lecture series at PUMA Headquarters on Thursday 7th June, the third in a series of four lectures organised by Jonathan Chapman.

Jonathan Chapman has recently developed ‘ 50 ways of thinking and doing sustainable design’ for Puma (seen as a poster in the image above, behind the speaker who is Fiona Bennie, from the first lecture). Jonathan has curated this event-based network to ‘stimulate essential debate and encourage the learning and the exchange of knowledge between practising designers, and specialists in sustainable design thinking.’

We also heard last week in Copenhagen that Puma have recently completed their first Environmental Profit and Loss Statement, which places a monetary value on the impacts of their production system.

“Analysing a company’s environmental impact this way, and understanding where environmental measures are necessary, will not only help conserve the benefits of ecosystem services but also ensure the longevity of our business”, says Jochen Zeitz, Executive Chairman of PUMA and Chief Sustainability Officer of PPR.

To sign up for the events contact psdc@puma.com

The TED team were at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit last week, where we listened to a range of presentations from speakers and initiatives exploring sustainable fashion.

The Sustainable Apparel Coalition is made up of brands who have partnered together and who are developing an Apparel Index, which allows any company to assess their environmental and social impacts using this tool (they are piloting the Index which can be downloaded and tested by anyone). TED had a sneak preview in the US last month and it is potentially a very helpful free tool to raise awareness about sustainability within companies and brands.

Other speakers at the conference included Galahad Clarke from Vivo Barefoot, a shoe company for people who don’t want to wear shoes; and Bruno Pieters, founder of Honest By, who brought a wonderful ‘designerly’ feel to the day as he talked of his inspiration for setting up a fully transparent clothing label.

The day finished with the organisers from the NICE project presenting the EU Climate Change Minister with a proposal for a Code of Conduct and Manual for a more sustainable fashion industry to the EU.

The Code and Manual was inspired by the UN Global Compact’s ten principles, and was developed in close consultation with industry representatives and other relevant stakeholders.

TED was involved with consulting on the Design section of the Code and our TED’s TEN design strategies are included as a key ‘Resources’ for further information.

The full Code can be read on the BSR website.

TED is going to visit the exhibition on Textiles collected by Seth Siegelaub for the  Center for Social Research on Old Textiles ( CSROT) at Raven Row today. The exhibition will feature over 200 items from a collection currently comprising around 650 historic textiles. It will include woven and printed textiles, embroideries and costume, ranging from fifth-century Coptic to Pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles, late medieval Asian and Islamic textiles, and Renaissance to eighteenth-century European silks and velvets. Barkcloth (tapa) and headdresses from the Pacific region (especially Papua New Guinea) and Africa will also be on display.

Raven Row was part of the historic silk weaving district in London, and one of the galleries will address the history of the Spitalfields’ silk industry. Seth Siegelaub founded the Center for Social Research on Old Textiles in 1986, which conducts research on the social history of hand-woven textiles. In 1997 he edited and published the Bibliographica Textilia Historiae, the first general bibliography on the history of textiles, which has since grown online to over 9,000 entries.

TED is looking for a new member to join its engaged and dynamic team that is seen as a global leader in sustainable textile design practice-based research. The role of Senior Research Fellow will involve undertaking research and contributing to the development of the TED research project – continuing TED’s development of research into the environmental impacts of textile design, production, use and disposal. The right candidate will ensure their findings are published via the appropriate channels to reach an international audience at the highest level and be of high enough quality to enter REF in 2014.

The role also involves collaborating within TED’s research projects and with its staff members, and to contribute to the research culture at the University. TED is also part of the Textile Futures Research Centre (TFRC), of which the Fellow would become a member. We are looking for an accomplished textile designer or researcher, ideally with international experience in industry-related work and practice-based research. The role requires a contribution to the Universities curriculum and to engage with the students with enthusiasm and knowledge.

Please find the links for the job description on the Guardian, Drapersjobs, Eco Textile News, and the University of the Arts Website.

Becky Earley will present the consultancy work we have been busy on for the last year, at the MISTRA Future Fashion Symposium next week on May 2nd in Copenhagen.

Becky’s presentation will explore the design and product development process we went through for transforming some of the TED’s TEN strategies and concepts into actual prototypes, for a major US clothing company’s Innovation Summit.

Some of the findings from the process will be available shortly.

 
Becky Earley and Kay Politowicz will be presenting at the SHARE Conference here at Chelsea on May 11-12, hosted by the CCW Graduate School.

This international conference organised by ELIA, considers the challenges, opportunities and critical issues faced in the building of new – and the further development of existing – programmes and platforms for doctoral education and research for the creative arts.

We are heading to Copenhagen next week to attend the NICE Fashion Summit as well as to catch up with the MISTRA Future Fashion group of researchers.

The Nordic countries are doing some really forward-looking work around sustainable fashion, including the MISTRA Future Fashion project funded by the Swedish government.

The Danish government are head of the EU this year and as part of their Presidency they are hoping to propose a set of guidelines for potential policy making at EU level, around sustainable fashion. TED have been invited to attend this workshop on the 2nd May.

At the NICE Conference we are also looking forward to hearing Bruno Pieters, the designer behind Honest By, who has created the world’s first 100% transparent fashion brand. Beautiful.

Lauren Currie from Snook, the service design team who work to make social change happen, was here last month at TED exploring service design ideas around fashion.

She has pulled together a short reflection video from some of us on the day and an insightful blog post on the role of services.

Jen Ballie, our PhD student looking at co-design and fashion responded to Lauren’s post with some insights around empathy:

” I think there is so much we can learn and borrow from the world of service design. I love how you use empathy to connect to people and your work has so much meaning / value that really benefits people.

Within fashion – big brands are really interested in using service design – but to date this has been used to pull people in store and sell more stuff and sometime the intended value / purpose becomes lost in the process and the service isn’t usually sustained beyond a limited period.

How can fashion connect to service design whilst staying true to original values?”

Lots of food for thought, and we see another whole project emerging in itself

PS: Lauren and her team has also just won the 2012 Young Scot Enterprise Award! Congratulations

From Susan Noble, PhD candidate at TED:

TRIP ‘was an international symposium exploring the role and relevance of traditional ‘hand skills’ in contemporary textiles, and the value and status of craft process.’ It was organized by the Textile Research Group at the School of the Arts, Loughborough University
, November 2011. The presentations were diverse in range and scope, exploring the key themes without digressing from the focus. A significant theme was the trace of the hand, the presence of the maker: ‘The hand-made has acquired a new value and respect in recent years’.

This was not at the exclusion of new technology but presenters explored working with technology though planned disruption to generate intended inconsistencies, to reference the hand-made. It was interesting to hear discussion of the value of handmade as a process beyond the outcome and the relationship of process to product, particularly evident in the presentations by Josephine Steed and Angharad Thomas. Emma Shercliff echoes this in her examination of ‘the experience of the maker’ and looked at craft from a different perspective to the Sennett model, which was referenced by other speakers.

An important part of the event, like so often, was the opportunity to mix with like-minded people, exchange ideas and information and feel both validated and ‘at home’ – TRIP presented a germane view of the value of craft, that positioned it’s status as an activity of far more worth than can be measured by outcome alone.