Lecture by Ezio Manzini at UAL

8 May 2013

The UAL DESIS Lab will host a lecture by Ezio Manzini on Monday 20th of May titled ‘People-as-asset, A radical social innovation and a design opportunity’.

Ezio Manzini has been working for more than two decades in the field of design for sustainability, with a special focus on social innovation. On this topic he started, and currently coordinates, DESIS: an international network promoting, world wide, design schools as agents of social change towards sustainability.

Ezio Manzini’s work has been inspirational in the development of TED for many years in how the role of the designer is extended beyond producing products towards becoming a systems and service thinker. The role of the designer as change-maker also inspired Clara Vuletich’s PhD with MISTRA.

The lecture starts at 6.30pm at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. Tickets are free but registration is required via Eventbrite.

 

Debates in Enterprise and Sustainability

29 April 2013
The debate on 15th of May includes key sustainability leaders across UAL that will explore what kind of future awaits students and graduates from UAL and how creative roles in art & design can contribute to a more sustainable developments. Chaired by Jeremy Till, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design Professor, the debate is structured around three questions that will each be addressed by 4 speakers:

 

Transitions:

What do we mean by a sustainable future in a creative company?

With TFRC Director Professor Rebecca Earley, Anthony Bennett, David Bent and David Cross.

 

Behaviour:

As practitioners in art and design, how can we change behaviours for a more sustainable future?

With Ed Gillespie, Virginia Gardiner, Dilys Williams and Adam Thorpe.

 

Paradigm Shifts :

What is the greatest barrier and opportunity for creating a sustainable future?

With MA Textile Futures Course Leader Caroline Till, Professor Lawrence Zeegen, Michaela Crimmin and Lord Redesdale.

 

The event will start at 1.30pm and end at 6.30pm in the St Bride’s Foundation, Bride Lane, Fleet Street, EC4Y 8EQ. Tickets cost £10 for students and £15 for standard entry.

For bookings and further information please visit the event’s website.

The Eco Chic Design Award is open for entries

29 April 2013

The EcoChic Design Award is a sustainable fashion design competition inspiring emerging fashion designers and students to create mainstream clothing with minimal textile waste.

The 2013 competition cycle is now open for applications from fashion designers with less than three years’ professional experience and fashion design students living in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, UK, France, Belgium and Germany.

Applications can be sent until 15th of August 2013, with this year’s focus is on zero waste designers, upcycling designers, and reconstruction designers.The first price is to design a sustainable collection for Esprit’s Recycled Collection range next to a winner’s show at Hong Kong Fashion Week and £3000 price money. Last year TED researchers met with the touring finalists Wister Tsang and Angus Tsui from the competition and introduced them to TED’s TEN and our work at TED research.

For the full schedule, prices and information on the award please visit the Eco Chic Design Award site.

New York trip – Kirsti Reitan Andersen

25 April 2013

MISTRA PhD researcher Kirsti Reitan Andersen recently visited companies in New York together with Olof Werngren from Berlin based Swedish company Durated. Durated’s blog features more info about their visits. Kirsti has also met with Bob Bland from Manufacture NY, and has summed up her thoughts about the project on the MISTRA PhD students blog.

Kirsti is a PhD researcher on Project 1 of MISTRA Future Fashion, looking at new business models for sustainable fashion, and has opted for an engaged scholarship with us at Textiles Environment Design. Kirsti’s work focuses on how THE TEN and other tools from the research team are being embedded into companies and how they contribute to sustainable decision-making.

Durated is currently developing a new e-commerce platform that will include insights into the production, logistics and social aspects of the purchased products for conscious consumers. This will contribute to follow the life-story of a product from cradle to grave, to support changes of owners or even to resell the products through the company itself.

New THE TEN cards

23 April 2013

The TED’s TEN cards were launched by the TED research team in 2011 as a tool to enable workshop participants to design using sustainability as a driver for innovation. The team has now updated the text on the cards, now called THE TEN, to reflect fully the questions that each strategy addresses and to provide examples of how they can be approached.

The cards are used to enable design thinking approaches to the making, lifecycle and aesthetic values of a product. TED is using strategies 1-5 at H&M this spring in a course that has been specifically designed for their divisions.

The strategies can be a catalyst for companies and individuals to apply sustainable thinking to small and large-scale decisions, driving future innovation and new ways of doing business.

The new cards are available for sale from the TFRC web-shop.

Black Hack Chat today

18 April 2013

A key element for TED researchers is to facilitate workshops that can inspire consumers and designers to engage with materials through closed-loop thinking, and to share their ideas with fellow participants. With this at the heart of today’s workshop Professor Becky Earley will run the Black Hack Chat session – via Skype – at the Crafting the Future Conference in Gothenburg, with collaborators Jen Ballie and Otto von Busch hosting the session in the space. The event will be filmed and the team will document the discourse and the making with the participants. Watch this space for updates on the outcomes of the session and follow the Twitter feed #blackhackchat.

The Geometrics exhibition

17 April 2013

TED member Melanie Bowles of the People’s Print will be exhibiting her work alongside other eminent textile designers at The Geometrics exhibition. Melanie has recently launched a new series of e-books – tutorials to develop digital print designs and that can be accessed through her website.

The Geometrics collective is made up of diverse artists, designers and researchers, all of whom trained in textile design and who continue to drive forward the geometric form inherent in their original study. Supported by Kingsgate Workshops Trust and the Slow Textiles Group, they publish new work, research and thinking on geometric structures.

The private view is on 19th April (6pm-9pm) and the exhibition runs from 20th April – 5th May at the Kingsgate Gallery, 110-116 Kingsgate Road, London NW6 2JG. More about the Symposium programme and events can be found here.

TED researchers in Milan

9 April 2013

This week TED researchers Prof. Kay Politowicz, Clara Vuletich and Miriam Ribul will be visiting the Salone del Mobile in Milan. Watch this space for a report on our favourite work from this year’s showcase. We look forward to seeing Swedish Design goes Milan, the MA Textile Futures showcase at MOST by Tom Dixon, and the work by Konstfack students exhibited at Spazio Rossana Orlandi amongst other exhibits. Oh, and drinking great coffee of course!

Invite to MISTRA event in May

9 April 2013

TED researchers will be at the MISTRA Future Fashion Symposium in Malmo on May 29th 2013. Please join us for a workshop run by Dr. Kate Goldsworthy and Clara Vuletich. The event is titled ‘Sustainability and Producer Responsibility in Textiles’ and is organised by project 8 within the consortium.

The symposium will explore the latest research and developments in this field an identify what key issues need to be addressed in order to accelerate progress. Key topics for the day will be ‘take back’ schemes that are being introduced from large companies, new business opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs, how to accelerate reuse and recycling and various frameworks for action for policy-makers.

Information on how to register and more information can be found here.

TED’s suggested reads

28 March 2013

Sustainable activity is in the air this Spring. Here are some projects we think are a great read to further look into. A brand new report by TexSture entitled ‘The Better Consumer in Europe: The Trends fashion companies should watch to make good decisions.’ can be downloaded for free following this link. The report pulls together all existing data around sustainable consumers in the EU as of date, analyses it and explains what it means for EU retail market overall.

The Textile Exchange features new events for 2013, including the Textile Sustainability Conference in Istanbul in November 2013, and the 3rd Annual Evolving Textiles Conference in North Carolina – where TED researchers completed a project last year-  on sustainable practice in domestic textile production, companies and retail.

Redress are featuring the launch of the fourth sustainable fashion competition. The EcoChic Award is open to designers from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Singapore, UK, France, Germany and Belgium. Find out more on their Facebook page. Redress also launched a 365 Challenge, featuring key experts celebrating swapping as a stylish and sustainable way to maintain a wardrobe without waste.

Another good read is the Danish Fashion Institute‘s and Deloitte’s published free downloadable report on ‘Fashioning Sustainability’, focusing on environmental issues in the supply chain, reuse of materials and closed loop thinking in the landscape of the increasing need to engage consumers.

H&M, one of the organisations part of the MISTRA Future Fashion consortium, has published their new sustainability report 2012. The key achievements are mapped against their seven conscious commitments. The highlight of the report is that for the first time H&M published a full list of their suppliers. More comment on the report can be read on Ecotextile News and Ecouterre. TED researchers will deliver a bespoke training program at H&M between April and June, featuring a series of inspiring lectures by Professor Becky Earley to 600 design staff, and an in-depth workshop with the New Development team, to explore design thinking for sustainability.