Actively Constructing Garments

Have you ever had a garment that you loved the feel of the fabric, but did not really care much for the style? This could be one reason why consumers are likely to throw garments away. The website eHow.com, states that four million tons of textiles are sent to landfills each year, that’s 4.5% of solid waste. The book Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World, by Alastair Fuad-Luke, discusses that one of the reasons why people are more apt to throw garments away is because they have no emotional attachment to them. He labels consumers into two different groups: under consumers, groups of people who are trying to meet their basic physiological needs, and over consumers, groups of people who must reduce their massive consumption habits and adopt more sustainable strategies. As he continues to discuss the over consumer group, he develops different strategies that can help these consumers become more sustainable. One of these strategies is called a co-design strategy and is the inspiration for my design concept.

My concept this week is to develop a business that uses a co-design strategy, meaning consumers work with designers to develop a customized product, which allows the consumer to form an attachment to the product because they feel as though they made it. This type of company will target the over consumer group and allow them to feel as though they are helping the under consumer group. Within my business customers will bring a couple of their garments they no longer wear to our store, where they can assist designers in reconstructing a new garment that they can rewear again. Another selling point of the company to gain a stronger clientele, will be that if the customer does not want the left over scraps, we will salvage them and develop them into another garment that will be donated overseas to people who would be classified as under consumers. This concept is one way of preventing garments from being sent to land-fills, while still helping people in the under consumer category and the over consumer group.

Punishments Vs. Rewards

Psychologists have studied whether punishments or rewards are more effective in teaching children, but do the same results they have found apply with businesses as well? As environmental issues become even more of apparent within our society, actions to better our situations must take place quickly. In the reading C2CAD: a sustainable apparel design and production, a group of researchers discuss their idea of a model that assists apparel designers in producing sustainable products that will never have waste. I believe this model could be used as inspiration for new regulations for the design of products.

I propose that in the future we will have new regulation agencies that require businesses to test their products and fill out paper work that guarantees their product to have a cradle-to-cradle life-cycle rather than a cradle-to-grave life-cycle. I also propose that in the future businesses will take this into consideration and form business agreements that will assist in upcycling. An example of this would be a beverage company forming an agreement to have their products recycled back to their company and donated to a textile manufacturer, which will in-turn recycle the bottles into new garments.

My concept is inspired by two different ideas. The first being technical metabolism, which was developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. This idea discusses that products of synthetic materials or toxic chemicals be upcycled, recycled into more valuable products, giving a product more than just one life. This can be done by breaking a product down to its technical nutrients, or molecular level, and creating a new product.

The second idea that inspired my concept comes from the book Textile Futures: Fashion, Design, and Technology, by Bradley Quinn. In this reading, Quinn exposes multiple designers who use the concept of upcycling to produce their garments. He discusses one designer in particular who uses technical metabolism with their garment productions as they take plastic bottles and upcycles them into garments.

As new concepts and ideas are developed, they must be implemented into the business world. As environmental issues are gaining speed, it can be easier to have them implemented in a timely fashion by forming new agencies to regulate this and punish or reward the companies who disobey or obey.