The objective of this workshop is to create a space for synthesis and to build on the paper sessions on sustainability, with a focus on design education. What roles can designers play in the vision towards sustainability? What is required of design curricula, pedagogies, educators, academic institutions and wider partnerships to support students adopting these new or modi ed roles? The workshop aims to set an agenda for years to come and to create an ongoing ‘think and do-tank’. This interactive and action orientated workshop is led by an interdisciplinary group from the Cumulus network and the Cumulus working group for sustainability, representing European and Asian perspectives, and both theory and practice.

This will be a three hour-long workshop with practical outcomes. Max: 30 participants.

The workshop is structured in three consecutive sessions.

1. The synthesis of insights from paper sessions & shared examples of best practices.

2. The new designer roles at the intersection of curriculum, tradition and emerging socio-cultural, economic and ecological systems.

3. Designing: prototypes for integrating relevant and applicable sustainability learning into the design curriculum and academic institutions.

Outcome:

Exhibits: 1. prototypes for sustainability learning in academic institutions and in our wider partnerships; and 2. an agenda proposal for a ‘think and do-tank’ for ongoing Cumulus conferences.

Organised as a dialogue between nature and design, this book explores design ideas, opportunities, visions and practices through relating and uncovering experience of the natural world.

Presented as an edited collection of 25 wide-ranging short chapters, the book explores the possibility of new relations between design and nature, beyond human mastery and understandings of nature as resource and by calling into question the longstanding role for design as agent of capitalism. The book puts forward ways in which design can form partnerships with living species and examines designers’ capacities for direct experience, awe, integrated relationships and new ways of knowing.

If you imagine how numerous we are and multiply that by the number of outfits we have, that makes many billion garments… and yet how much do we know about our clothes? What can we say about the relationships we have with the contents of our wardrobe? What do we know about the principles embodied by our garments or their longevity? Is there a garment that promotes an ecological awareness that transforms our relationships with materials and our experience of the world? In this short paper, we introduce new ideas about the lifetimes of fashion clothing that question not only the status quo in mainstream industry but also that in the eco-clothing sector.

We think the connection between fashion clothes and rhythms of time is crucial because of its implications for ecological thinking and sustainability. For too long the chief response of environmentalists to questions of fashion obsolescence of clothes has been simply that it is unnecessary and that it should not happen. But this neglects the power and influence of fashion and the complexity and subtlety of the relationship between fashion, clothing and consumers over time.

From a time-based perspective, different users, different patterns of use and different fashion levels inform the design. The result is a more diverse, more rhythmic, more ecological response. Our approach proposes that we acknowledge that fashion and clothes are not identical, although their use and looks sometimes coincide. It engages with consumer-garment interaction as an important part of the fashion cycle - both in terms of driving the fashion cycle and in terms of environmental impact. We believe that in order to achieve more ecological practices in the fashion and clothing industry, we must understand and use the rhythm of fashion, the dialogue between our clothing, ourselves and the zeitgeist.

The Earth Logic Action Research Plan for fashion is a visionary and radical invitation to fashion researchers, practitioners, business leaders and decision makers to call out as fiction the idea that sustainability can be achieved within economic growth logic and instead to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) of envisioning fashion connected with nature, people and long term healthy futures. The plan does this by placing Earth first – before profit, before everything. This is both simple and changes everything.

The plan comprises three parts to support Earth Logic action research in fashion.

Part I is a values-explicit context that also acts an evaluative framework which can be used to plan, select and evaluate research and development projects. Part II is a checklist to keep action research on a radical track. Part III is made up of six holistic landscapes that set out progressive areas for transformation of the fashion sector directed at the whole system of fashion.

The clothing industry employs 25 million people globally contributing to many livelihoods and the prosperity of communities, to women’s independence, and the establishment of significant infrastructures in poorer countries. Yet the fashion industry is also a significant contributor to the degradation of natural systems, with the associated environmental footprint of clothing high in comparison with other products.Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes, and paradigms and takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues of:• Fashion in a post-growth society• Fashion, diversity and equity• Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systemsThis handbook is a unique resource for a wide range of scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities interested in sustainability and fashion.

On a generic level, caring can be described as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This paper asks how we as design researchers in Scandinavia come to care, for our world and more specifically for the local NORDES community. We do this by describing how we have maintained, continued and added (as a practice of repair) in relation to the most recent NORDES summer school (2018). The summer school invited students to work with tensions between despair, in a site marked and haunted (Tsing et al., 2017) by the aftermath of industrial design practices and hope, by making time for soil (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in a community-supported agricultural scheme. The paper invites you to share some cruxes and insights that emerged, and to imagine teaching with care as a collective process that attempts to bring things together, not as oppositions, but as generative and productive relations.

In Holding Surplus House we have been inquiring into change for multispecies flourishing - starting in households as dynamic units, experimenting with resources, values and seasons. We have made two main tracks: Citizen Budgeting and Seasonal Clothing

The Stored Wisdom project (completed 2005), conducted by Sadowska and Tham (joint PI's), explored how artefacts may bridge the gap between personal and professional value positions, and between individuals within the field of design. In a series of workshops, everyday artefacts were used to create 'uncontaminated spaces' where discussions about sensitive issues could safely be initiated. This was found especially valuable when a topic may cause tension or guilt, such in the cases of sustainability and gender. The research was unique in methodological approach merging emerging design methods (such as the cultural probes) with particular value systems.

In 1998 Jannet Jessel conducted a project exploring communication with designers. Her findings pointed to some observations including: (a) designers do not read (particularly lots of text), (b) designers don't always listen, (c) designers think with pictures, (d) designers think in “blobby” often unrelated thought patterns, (e) designers often have trouble translating imagery back into non-visual communication. At the same time, all designers engage in communication professionally and personally on a daily basis.The complex nature of communication within the design practice and design research, between these communities and with the outside world formulates the basis of this paper. How can we engineer communication that transcends language barriers and hierarchies?As design professionals and researchers we have dedicated our efforts to the exploration of gender and sustainability. The choice of subjects gives our investigations political connotations. Under these conditions, a space for unbiased, open interactions between researchers and practitioners can be difficult to create. We propose the artefact as a door to, or 'a cultural probe' for unleashing a wealth of narratives that we argue are a non-confrontational way to communicate. Through artefacts, the elicited narratives can simplify complex issues and give a human face to abstract knowledge. Within areas of sensitive nature, these characteristics make artefacts and resulting narratives excellent facilitators of communication.The current literature situates artefacts as metaphors for the self that create a point of autobiographic self-discovery. Through their application, artefacts are strong participants within socio-cultural practices of individuals that use language to attribute or explain meanings of artefacts. Our investigation of artefacts is inspired by co-operative inquiry methodologies, where the researcher's own experiences are a valid source of information, and where the research is carried out with rather than on people. Of special interest is the notion of an 'extended epistemology' and different ways of knowing. They reach beyond the conventional propositional knowing, through theories and ideas, into experiential knowing, practical knowing and presentational knowing. Acknowledging these wider spectra of learning and communication is especially relevant in the design context where inspiration, intuitive and tacit knowledge play an important role and where problem solving is often non-linear and heterarchical.Based on our research and additional experimental workshops we have begun to look for narrative frameworks as to how artefacts are used as mediators. As suggested by our investigations, situated within and embodying a variety of narratives, artefacts can function as a leverage point to unlock complex relationships often of sensitive nature. The fact that most of us have frequent experiences of the artefacts provides a collective starting point for 'uncontaminated' explorations. The artefacts become a commonly shared platform for design practitioners or design researchers to facilitate and validate their ability to communicate amongst themselves or those outside the discipline. The artefacts become carriers of narratives that mind the gap between the 'professional self' and the 'personal self' as well as between individuals.

As disciplines and practices archaeology and design stand in an interesting relationship to one another. Whereas it is the business of designers to construct material and, at times, immaterial universes that can sustain life (or, as we shall see, destroy life), it is the business of archaeologists, in the traditional sense of the word, to look at the remnants of those universes and the traces of those who populated them in order to understand the past and the ways in which it resonates in the present and in our conception of our possible futures.

This leads us to pose the following question: If an intimate relationship can be located at the interstitial space between archaeology and design, what might happen if we were to construct transversal lines between and across these disciplines, and what concepts would be required for us to do so?

Drawing upon the concept of the Anthropocene – a concept opening up to precisely such transdisciplinary and transversal approaches – this article explores the notion of a post-anthropocentric speculative archaeology interweaving a theoretical line of thought and a performative, fictive trajectory.

This workshop explores power relations in collaborative design research. As co-creation is becoming more established and even something of a holy grail, it is important to revisit and further understandings of, for example, the limits to democracy in collaborative research and conflicting agendas. The workshop draws on ongoing research that explores housing needs and solutions at the intersection of an ageing population, students and migrants, and that engages multiple stakeholder groups in collaborative processes. The proposed workshop will stage an enactment of the research design, from invitation to analysis, with the workshop participants playing the different roles in the process. This will enable us, collaboratively, to critically and creatively engage with some concrete interfaces to power negotiations as well as the meta level of power dynamics in collaborative research.

We will enrich our understandings of power relations by engaging with indigenous thinking, expressed as decolonizing methodologies. 

This workshop explores power relations in collaborative design research. As co-creation is becoming more established and even something of a holy grail, it is important to revisit and further understandings of, for example, the limits to democracy in collaborative research and conflicting agendas. The workshop draws on ongoing research that explores housing needs and solutions at the intersection of an ageing population, students and migrants, and that engages multiple stakeholder groups in collaborative processes. The proposed workshop will stage an enactment of the research design, from invitation to analysis, with the workshop participants playing the different roles in the process. This will enable us, collaboratively, to critically and creatively engage with some concrete interfaces to power negotiations as well as the meta level of power dynamics in collaborative research. We will enrich our understandings of power relations by engaging with indigenous thinking, expressed as decolonizing methodologies. 

This short text seeks to expand and problematise the definition of sustainability in fashion (and beyond), and simultaneously illuminate the work of Ann-Sofie Back, as a whole and in its aspects, in a way that gives it a kind of dignity that other lenses have perhaps not afforded. I write from the perspective of sustainability ‘expert’, and a long-time and keen wearer of Ann-Sofie Back’s clothes. 

Introduction to the project BOOST metadesign, and the context of metadesign.

This text explores what it can be like to care from within fashion, drawing on the experience of activism from within fashion since the mid 1990s. It offers a metadesign framework with nested levels of fashion activity to identify agentic spaces in fashion and beyond.

The discourse on environmental improvement of textiles has, in the main, focused on the material realisation of a particular fabric or garment. The fashion industry is increasingly putting strategies into place to achieve cleaner and more efficient processes, and the specifications of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) work is becoming increasingly standardised. However, our relationship to textiles and fashion – in our roles as designers, makers and users, cannot be reduced to tick-box lists or explained by numbers, and in its rich diversity it defies streamlined models. The activities of designing, creating, crafting, styling, dressing and creating anew, harbour such a wealth of imagination, stored wisdom, complexity of judgement, connectedness – and pure enjoyment. Much of this is tacit knowledge and easily eludes the author of a CSR document. Yet, this chapter argues that these qualities, intrinsic to all textile work (and play), are imperative in the pursuit of truly sustainable textiles and fashion. Many opportunities are missed when all garments are treated alike, without consideration of fashion level or patterns of use. In recent years we have seen how a deep understanding of textiles and fashion can elegantly manifest itself in a series of activities and events: from hacking or customising workshops to knitting circles, from pop-up vintage shops to clothing libraries. Key to the ‘sustainability’ of these phenomena (some in themselves ‘vintage’) is that they shift the emphasis of our relationship with the textile or the garment – and thus with the world – from consuming to participating. Key is also their recognition of the importance of diversity, and their in-tuneness with both the material and symbolic dimensions of the complex fashion system. They work exactly because they embrace the cultures of textiles and fashion, instead of opposing them. This chapter explores how a systemic approach can enrich the detailed development of textiles, and how both material and symbolic notions have a place in resilience thinking. 

This chapter explores how design, employed as a measure of hygiene and control of diversity, is scaled of from products to societal models. It mixes theoretical perspectives with autoethnography, through writing and drawing, and speculation. 

This chapter, discusses the notion of Equality in Hannah Arendt's work, and how equality can purposefully be practised in and through design. It proposes a set of principles for designing equality, specifically informed by the notion that genuine equality work is risky, because it necessitates taking sides; not being anti-racist is being racist. The chapter points to the intersectionality of sexism and racism with hierarchies of ways of knowing - epistemology.

The sustainability imperative requires that we REDO the products, systems and paradigms we are part of, think and do. Yet, entangled habit and fear can stop us from engaging in profound processes of change. In this talk, I want to creatively critically explore the man-madeness of the systems we live by, and design’s agile dance with them. I will draw on experiences from education, research and play to discuss both the promise and responsibility of freeing design.

The fashion industry at mass-market level is highly specialised. Fashion designers work in teams with buyers but it is rare that they are in direct contact with for example a textile designer or an environmental officer. This paper argues that while specialisation may allow individuals to focus on and develop their particular interests and companies to operate efficiently, it may simultaneously constitute an obstacle to innovation that a more open and varied knowledge ecology might support.

The wider context of this paper is an exploration into how a futures perspective may empower environmental improvement in the fashion industry at mass-market level.

As part of this PhD project (to be completed in spring 2007) a series of creative workshops with mixed stakeholder groups from the fashion industry took place in the UK and Sweden during spring 2006. The workshops generated scenarios for mass-market fashion in year 2026 and explored aspects such as user experience, retail outlets, and products and services made possible by new technology.

This paper presents some of the findings from these workshops. It shows how a mixed stakeholder working group can enable idea generation into new and rich territories and be empowering for professionals. An example of the more interesting concepts that emerged was how the participants used popular computer programs, such as I-tunes, and websites, such as My Space, as metaphors for new systems in fashion. Drawing upon these virtual spaces enabled new thinking and conversations, and concrete design ideas about what fashion might be in the future.

An exploration of the challenges, shameful, tricky aspects of working with housing and co-creative research.

This article explores the recent history of fashion’s adoption of sustainability, drawing out some key qualities of this process, and paying particular attention to how the culture of fashion itself has shaped it. Of particular importance is the question how long-lasting change can be embraced, sustained and (probably crucially) invigorated by a system that intrinsically favours novelty and thrives on the visual manifestation of change and the aestheticisation of politics. Some alternative readings of fashion and the fashion moment that may support a deeper and more holistic embracing of sustainability are suggested. The article takes a systemic perspective on fashion and sustainability. Yet, it tries to situate the discussion in everyday examples of the user, the designer and other stakeholders’ practices and experiences. The piece draws upon some relevant theory, and findings from my own research into fashion, sustainability, futures studies and metadesign.

How can we, together, make our home on Earth in a time of mass extinction, climate change and social segregation? In this book two interplaying housing crises converge. The first concerns affordable and suitable housing for groups unprioritised by the housing market: older persons, students and migrants. The second concerns our home on Earth: science gives us but a decade to avert catastrophic climate change. This book aims at both reporting on research in the project BOOST metadesign and providing hands-on advice akin to that offered in home economics classes. The book starts performing Oikology – Home ecologics, a field of knowledge and practice in times of complexity, messiness and never finished labour of making homes together within Earth’s limits. The exploration of housing development for older persons, students and migrants in a context of sustainability has been carried out during 2016–19 through processes of co-creation in urban and rural parts of Småland, southern Sweden. Metadesign has opened up for a holistic and systemic take on home making that integrates different dimensions of sustainability and moves from the small and local to the all-encompassing. This book is for people who make homes in their personal or professional lives. It imagines an overarching paradigm of home making which starts from relationships. This is exemplified through speculative scenarios, a set of cruxes to be bounced into the planning process, methods for transdisciplinary co-creation and 29 recipes for home making.

This paper explores the ‘brands’ of sustainability and fashion respectively andtheir emerging shared identity and ‘brand’. It argues that the realisation of afashion industry that fundamentally respects humans beings and our planetis dependent on an integration process that takes place at a deeper culturallevel, as well as the – hitherto prioritised – product and organisational levels.While fashion has in recent years made significant environmental improvementsin its processes, benefits are easily eaten up by the astounding speedand scale of mass-market fashion. A next generation of approaches, holisticand systemic, are required to achieve joined up infrastructures, to include awealth of stakeholders, and to target the deeper motivations behind bothproduction and consumption.The paper points to the emerging area of metadesign as a promisingapproach to the auspicious integration of – seemingly paradoxical – systems,and the significance of the role of languaging in bringing fashion andsustainability together.Drawing upon a recent empirical study, Lucky People Forecast (2008), into howsustainability can be communicated to fashion industry stakeholders in proactiveways, the paper proposes that using experiential and design-led approachescan help unveil sustainability within fashion’s qualities and capabilities.

This chapter describes a method of languaging fashion moments, designed to explore relationships with fashion at the level of paradigms and mindsets.

The detrimental environmental effects associated with fashion production and consumption are increasingly recognised, and strategies in place. However, these are production-focused, top-down strategies, which do not reach where the impact is highest - the user phase, or where the scope for improvement is utmost - the design phase. A growing body of academic research, and a niche representation of practitioners have responded by developing lifecycle and whole systems approaches. This PhD thesis seeks to expand on and bring this knowledge to the unexplored domain of the highest impact – the fashion industry’s mass-market segment.

Trend-forecasting is integral to the fashion design process, and supports the organisation’s commercial endeavours. This thesis explores the potential of trend-forecasting as a positive agent of change for environmental improvement at systemic level in the fashion industry’s mass-market segment.

The first empirical study, Stage 1, is diagnostic and exploratory, mapping the interactions that currently exist between trend-forecasting, fashion design and environmental work. The findings and emergent theories formed the basis for a novel methodology compatible with trend-forecasting methods, processes in fashion design, and the inclusive and transformative processes implicit in sustainability.

Stage 2 applies this methodology in an experimental study - a series of creative workshops with mixed fashion industry stakeholder groups in the UK and Sweden. Set in 2026, the workshops explore how the underlying proposition “what if fashion and sustainability were compatible or even synergistic?” could affect attitudinal change, and what its generative potential could be.

The study shows that a richer knowledge ecology can foster proactive discussions in the realm of sustainability and fashion. It also reveals how a futures perspective and creative approach can unleash the application of fashion professionals’ skills at strategic and systemic levels. The research resulted in recommendations for the application of the new trend-forecasting methodology on a larger scale.

The paper discusses the role of fashion forecasting as a means of addressing the challenges of currently unsustainable fashion systems, intervening at the level of products to paradigms.

Tid beskrivs i den västerländska samtiden ofta som lyx. Tid är också en viktig faktor i design. Som modedesigner kan man se tiden som ett slags meddesigner som hjälper till att slipa materialet och plaggets uttryck. Jag vill här visa hur förståelse av tid kan ge oss insikt i hållbarhetsstrategier för mode och på så sätt främja det riktigt långa tidsperspektivet – vår överlevnad.

Ur kombinationen av kläder uppstår ibland mode, och modeögonblicket generar allt som oftast ’energi’ – det sprider ett kreativt uppsåt och firar en upplevelse av fullständig förening med tid och rum. Idag vilar modeögonblicket på en avancerad, energikrävande och materialintensiv produktionsapparat, och även konsumentledet av modet har en ansenlig miljökostnad. I den här texten vill jag undersöka inte bara det uppenbara och erkända behovet att minska en resursanvändning, som på flera vis dras till sin spets i modeögonblicket, utan också lyfta fram några av de positiva värden, den laddning som modet förkroppsligar, och som kan – vill jag föreslå - gagna ett bredare hållbarhetsperspektiv.

This paper uses the notion of ‘off-centredness’ to highlight and critique a North Western conceit, hegemony and anthropocentric worldview, and an interwoven dominant construction of sustainability as ‘other’. It argues that while this generally is detrimental to social and natural systems, it also has repercussions on the specific context of education for design for sustainability. The paper proposes that pedagogy in this remit can be enriched by the positioning of ourselves - as educators and students - as humble co-learners. It offers a tentative pedagogical framework - ‘from me to we’ and from ‘product to paradigm’. This has the purpose of supporting co-learners to, from a deep understanding of, and connection with self and place, and engagement with design as physical object, form understandings of and meaningful relationships with the world as a whole. This should help enable co-learners to find agency as civilians and designers to contribute to futures of sustainability. The research has twinned applications. It informs the curricula of two new degree programmes in design at Linnaeus University, Sweden. It will result in a web-based learning resource open for general use.

This text describes the benefits of diversifying strategies for sustainability in fashion, and demonstrateshow design can be applied beyond the product level.

This presentation (available online) explores the potential of ten radical scenarios for fashion.

This chapter explores the potential role of Futures Studies, as manifested in fashion forecasting, in the endeavour of creating sustainability in fashion. It argues that forecasting can be helpful in advancing sustainability in two key ways: 1) by offering a framework for systemic and systematic scenario building at the nested levels of products, systems and paradigms 2) by offering a zone in the fashion industry for much needed reflection, explorations of values, imagination and envisioning. The approaches can be described as metadesign, a design of design itself, seeds for change, a collaborative and inclusive design process.

This paper explores the role of shame in procrastinating engagement with the need for more sustainable fashion practices. It argues that shame constitutes an important barrier to more pervasive changes, alongside more widely recognised obstacles relating to, for example, lack of knowledge, the complexity of the supply chain, limitations of legislation or financial incitements. 

The chapter positions a belief that we can and must have overview before we act as a barrier to real change, a belief intertwined with the economic growth logic, sexism, racism and human exceptionalism that co-creates unsustainability. Instead, it proposes metadesign as an uncompromisingly systemic and holistic craft of making change from within a ball of yarn. It takes the reader on a journey and meditation from Me to We to World and Back Again, exploring how a system of approaches—languaging, learning and governance—can support change agency from within each position. The chapter foregrounds care as a relational, intimate practice of healing available to anyone, anywhere; thereby decentralising response ability (Haraway, 2008) in the face of urgent convergent social and ecological crises.

The presentation explored how gender identity is manifested at the level of the designed artefact, design disciplines, design itself, as well as a dominant understanding of the world.

It was proposed that gender identity, and particularly unlocking a binary understanding of it, may have a pivotal role in creating futures of sustainability.

‘How can we design a meaningful and relevant research platform that will support futures of sustainability?’ was the question guiding the two-and-a-half-year- long, co-creative and emergent metadesign process of establishing a new research platform at the Department of Design, Linnaeus University, Sweden. The meta focus on developing a whole research environment, as a design practice and design research endeavour, should be valuable for the design research community. Findings concern the viability of co-creative approaches in such a remit, negotiations of artistic/scientific research conventions, and the design institution’s position in the multi-disciplined university. The research has identified tensions and conflicts between the academic institution and construct, and the application of ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies deemed auspicious for sustainability endeavours. The paper itself is a collaborative effort between eleven of the researchers involved in developing the research platform.