Circular Design Researchers in Residence: a workshops report for the circular design speeds project with Filippa K (2016-2018)

Executive Summary

If you are a fashion brand who wants to be part of the circular economy and who has already begun these conversations within the company, then you will know that becoming ‘circular’ is extremely challenging. Brands need to collaborate across multiple sectors – and getting the internal design team to do this can be tricky. At the same time, academic researchers and other experts need to find ways to apply and contextualize their knowledge, if they want to contribute their ideas in an impactful and meaningful way to the creation of a less-impactful fashion industry. This report documents the in-residence project that used a workshop facilitation methodology. It brought together a team of academic design researchers based at Centre for Circular Design at University of the Arts London, and a Swedish fashion brand, Filippa K, for what became known as the Circular Design Speeds project . The workshops were also supported by material and lifecycle assessment researchers connected to the Design Theme in the Mistra Future Fashion research programme.

When we began to plan this research in Spring 2015, it was hard to find information on how to design circular fashion textiles. In the space of the last four years, multiple organisations have created circular design guidelines. The work covered in this report adds to these valuable resources by differing in two ways: it explored how to make design decisions that related not only to recyclability of the product but also to the speed of lifecycle, from ‘ultra-fast’ to ‘super-slow’; it also focused on how to design and deliver the process of bringing a range of academic experts into the same room to work alongside the industry designers, to produce circular fashion products. Both elements of the work really challenged the participants to see circular design as an opportunity to change the industry at a systemic level.

The report sets out the plan for creating and testing the tools to support this ambition. It shows what part of the plan worked well, and what didn’t go so well. It presents the insights created through the pre-workshops which took place before the project began; the methods and tools developed for the project structure itself, and the key ideas that were generated through the delivery, along with feedback obtained through surveys and interviews. The report includes only minimal details about the final fast and slow prototypes, which were launched at the Disrupting Patterns showcase in London in November 2018 and also shown at Stockholm Fashion District in June 2019. You will these detailed on our project website – https://www.circulardesignspeeds.com/ - as well as in the final Design Theme report (Goldsworthy et al 2019), available from the Mistra Future Fashion website .

The report concludes with a model for Circular Design Researchers in Residence – this is the ‘what we would do differently now if we were starting again’ version. We hope this will provide a blueprint for those that might follow in similar footsteps – academic researchers and industry partners from all design disciplines and sectors, working side-by-side in the same room, to make real change through creating new products, systems and processes for our future circular economies.

Professor Rebecca Earley and Dr. Kate Goldsworthy
Centre for Circular Design (CCD) Researchers in Residence, Mistra Future Fashion Programme,
University of the Arts London

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