Design and optimisation of a user-engaged system for sustainable fashion

There is increasing pressure to consider sustainability in fashion design from consumers, industry and educators. Although awareness has grown significantly in the last decade, there are various challenges for linking sustainable production and consumption. Tools to support sustainable design practices exist in some disciplines; however, only a few tools exist to support fashion design. Furthermore, there is a lack of enabling tools which support designers to engage with diverse social actors to encourage sustainable fashion as a process of co-design. The purpose of this study was to investigate and develop an effective enabling design system and tool to support fashion designers and other users in considering production and consumption. In order to achieve this, Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) was selected. When initially approaching the problem, the results of two online surveys identified designers’ and general public groups’ previous attitudes, experiences and challenges towards sustainable fashion. The key lessons from this study were that although both these groups considered sustainability an important issue, this was not actualised in their daily activities. Secondly, fashion design groups were not aware of existing sustainable design tools and had not actively used them. There is demand for useful design tools for sustainable fashion design. After identifying the problems, a toolkit and co-design process was proposed to aid fashion designers and other users, to generate sustainable fashion designs during idea generation. The toolkit was iteratively refined through participatory research and its effectiveness was evaluated through a series of workshops and interviews. There emerged key considerations for the development of the tool and that a systematic level of change, triggering continuous actions, is essential for sustainable design practices rather than one-off events. Additional findings are discussed along with the feasibility and effectiveness of the toolkit, opportunities and challenges of co-designing in the sustainable fashion design system.