Responsive design: exploring institutional barriers to remanufacturing and reuse in higher education

Responsive design: exploring institutional barriers to remanufacturing and reuse in higher education

A challenge for a circular fashion industry is to reuse and remanufacture product parts before recycling fibers. This means however that the challenge for a circular clothing and fashion industry is more of a design issue. The aim of the project is to explore and scale up responsive design models in higher education to change the institution not only at the level of policy but in resource flows to increase the numbers of entrepreneurships that similar to other industries can work as change agents for bottom-up change in the fashion and clothing industry behavior.

The expected results of the project includes data on barriers to responsive design among students and teachers, prototypes of educations modules and realization of material resources and policy for practice in educational programs, pedagogic training and innovation tools. The sought after effect is a scaled up integration of responsive design models in higher education. The long term effect is increased circularity in the clothing and fashion sector achieved by a higher market segment based on reuse and remanufacturing.

Given the lack of response design models in fashion and clothing design the research will be conducted by experimental methods to develop and scale up educational practices, resources and policy through course cases and examples that is analysed and evaluated. The project is coordinated by the University of Borås (HB), in partnership with RMIT University, Monki AB, Emmaus Björkå and Berendsen AB.