Responsive design: methods for remanufacturing and reuse of fashion and clothing in volatile material flows

Responsive design: methods for remanufacturing and reuse of fashion and clothing in volatile material flows

A significant challenge for a conversion to a more circular fashion industry is to reuse and remanufacture product parts before recycling fiber to fiber thereby making greater environmental savings. This means however that the challenge for a circular clothing and fashion becomes more of a design problem. The challenge of combining product modules, heterogeneous and homogeneous, used and surplus, to new functional clothes and new fashion, is primarily an aesthetic, functional and expressive challenge, and secondly a technical one.

However, to product development through remanufacturing and reuse in clothing and fashion, a new type of product design processes is required that takes a different approach to materiality than the current one based of fibres, yarns and fabric by the meter. Also, this type of product development process must be able to meet the risks associated with insecure and varied material resources in the form of used or overstock product parts or similar.

The aim of the project is therefor to develop new design processes focusing on redesign and modular design from a design perspective. The research will be conducted by experimental methods to investigate form and material conditions in existing resources and to developed examples that will be analysed and evaluated aesthetically and functionally.