Experiencing Fashion - Better Lives Lecture Series

What is the designer’s role in negotiating wellbeing of all involved in the fashion process? How does the design process relate to wellbeing? Considering the makers, wearers and the subsequent individuals and communities affected by the product or concept being designed, what can a designer do to observe and consider human fulfilment in the design process?

Threads from Lecture 1 of the Better Lives series were drawn together before introducing Dilys Williams, designer and director of LCF’s Centre for Sustainable Fashion, and psychologist Professor Peter Ayton from City University to discuss how judgement and well-being impact our experiences.

Better Lives lecture series 2013: an Exploration through Fashion and Psychology

The Better Lives lecture series returns for the third time to continue to explore the underpinning ethos of London College of Fashion. This series offers a perspective on Better Lives that breaks new ground. Through the recent appointment of psychologist Dr Carolyn Mair, the College is able to explore the reciprocal relationship between fashion and psychology for the first time.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this lecture series allows fashion and psychology to come together through a series of discussions to reflect on human fulfilment and ecological prosperity.

The Better Lives Lecture Series is guided through the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, a testbed for generating new ideas and knowledge with ecological thriving and human fulfilment at its core.

‘Any and all voluntary behaviour, implicitly or explicitly requires judgement. Judgement refers to discernment: the mental ability to perceive and distinguish relationships. Traditionally, models of judgement were based on rationality and optimality rules such as expected utility theory. However more recently, research has shown that humans do not conform to these rules. For example, we are constrained by the limits of our information processing capacities and we exhibit different, often poor, assessment of risk, reward and probability. The latter may be due to cognitive overload, physical and emotional constraints or sensory manipulation. It is clear that outcomes of our judgements impact on our wellbeing, how we feel and function on personal and social levels, thus, the two are inextricably intertwined. ‘ Dr Carolyn Mair

Although the internal mental processes of judgement and wellbeing have been widely studied by cognitive psychologists, there exists sparse research on how these explicitly relate to and interact with fashion. In the Better Lives lecture series 2013, psychologists and fashion practitioners discuss how the internal processes involved in making judgements impact on and are impacted by fashion and how the interrelationships between these effect and are affected by subjective assessments of human fulfilment.