Designing Fast & Slow: exploring fashion textile life cycle speeds with industry stakeholders

This research aimed to discover more about circular design opportunities; in particular, what products should be created to travel quickly through a cycle, and which ones should travel slowly. Whilst much has been written about design for product longevity most of it focuses on pioneering SME’s rather than larger industry stakeholders. Current Industry tools provide quantitive information to evaluate a complex range impacts, but speed of the lifecycle is not considered. In order to address this lack, workshops were designed to use four typologies derived from previous LCA research – a polyester shirt, an outdoors jacket, a t-shirt and some jeans. 24 redesigned concepts were created over a four-month period with 56 industry stakeholders, explored through materials, business models and user mindsets lenses. The resulting concepts created speed-based insights which extended beyond individual garment scenarios, to include systems and user perspectives towards a more progressive view of product cycles for fashion.

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