Shifting Paradigms. Fashion + Technology

Texturel. 166 Fashion Design Initiatives (prototype version)
An interactive Text-Based Fashion Design ‘Oracle’ (App. for Smart Phone and iPad/Tablet).

Texturel is a fashion design ‘oracle’ conceived for Tablet and Mobile App (application software), which delivers a series of indirect textual instructions that subject to interpretation and application can offer potentially unconventional and unexpected design results and outcomes.

Intended to remedy a design problem or dilemma, encountered through sketching, drafting a pattern, draping, photographing, styling or accessorizing a model, location, garment or collection or any other given situation, Texturel proposes a degree of conceptual direction upon reaching such an impasse. The user is able to scroll through the system and by acting upon the first given proposition or else being motivated by a succession of increasingly abstracted directives, they can decide upon an appropriate strategy for progression.

As a generative design tool, the Texturel system will continuously remix and abstract the instructions given so that they are never repeated in exactly the same way during one use or session.

Oracles were historically considered to be portals through which the gods spoke and which were regarded as a source of wise counsel or prophetic predictions of the future. They also became celebrated as instruments of ingenuity, creativity and more latterly as a compelling means of exploiting accident within the arts. Chance procedures and systems were famously pioneered throughout the 20th Century by such names as Marcel Duchamp, Ellsworth Kelly, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who extensively utilized the ancient Chinese I Ching divination text, for example, to create artworks, choreography and musical scores.

Texturel continues this tradition and methodology but within a fashion context (although it is intended to have application to other design disciplines) and aims to nourish a shift in the way that fashion design is conceived, perceived and communicated. It is also concerned with a notion of inclusivity and innovention (the blend of innovation + invention) and how we can collectively partake in new fashion design processes that are distinctive, entertaining yet persuasive and edifying.

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