Designing Resilience: Mapping Singapore’s Sustainable Fashion Movements

Design has produced a world in which designers are presented with opportunities to alter, augment, intervene, and change existing conditions by imagining future possibilities. Many of the challenges facing the world today extend into a range of complex, societal issues that involve human actions within the natural world, resulting in a call towards sustainability. The role of design has undergone a shift from integrating systematic methods in the production of artifacts and information towards a focus on designing for more meaningful interactions. Design now requires new ways of thinking and doing through modifications, iterations and reflections to explore alternative models for education and practice. This leads to the development of new innovations and inclusive perspectives, forming social ecosystems to continually learn and evolve as a discipline for positive social change.

This research positions design as a force of change with a particular focus on sustainable fashion practices in Singapore. Design is capable of reconditioning existing knowledge against ecological concerns for methods of conservation and sustainability. It is foreseen that designing and capturing a map of Singapore’s slow fashion movements will provide models and frameworks for other practices that are centred on issues of social innovation, social enterprise design, and social economies. This project presents the need to define the social ecosystem of Singapore’s sustainable fashion, formalising existing industry practices towards a new paradigm for Asian design.