Programme
Launch CAG Meeting | 16 th February 2005
The Emotional Wardrobe was launched on 16 th February at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. The meeting was a 'getting to know you session', where members of the cluster presented their hopes for the direction and outcome of the year together with an overview of how their expertise might contribute to the development of The Emotional Wardrobe.
The launch uncovered a group of collective interests to be considered alongside the themes of the project: Interaction, user appropriation, sustainability and 'thinking through doing'.
Open Forum Workshop | 9 th March 2005
The Open Forum workshop took place at two sites at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design: Charing Cross Road and Southampton Row, and was facilitated by Remko Van Der Lugt from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands . The morning session convened at the fashion site at Charing Cross Road, in order to give the cluster members a taste of the fashion environment and creative design process.
Show and Tell
The day kicked-off with a show and tell exercise, designed to focus thoughts on the emotional connection that people have with their clothing. The members of the cluster were each asked to bring a personal item of clothing, which had strong emotional connotations. Each member related the story of their garment, highlighting its emotional and social significance. Some garments held memories of others or signified important periods in people's life, made a statement about personal identity or attitudes to clothing.
Scrapbox Challenge
The Scrapbox Challenge task aimed to further the understanding of fashion's emotional function by providing the members with some practical experience of handling and shaping cloth and clothing on the dress stand. The group was asked to select a garment they disliked from a selection of second-hand clothing. The intention was to remodel the garment to express a positive emotional aesthetic, using other garments and the extra fabric provided, pins, scissors and creativity! The responses to the brief were varied but touched upon issues of sustainability, national and personal identity, social comment, gender stereotyping and attitudes to the design of menswear. The group were also joined by Jane Tynan (lecturer in History of Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) who contextualised the remodeled creations from a fashion theory perspective.
Mind Mapping the Three Themes
The afternoon was spent mind mapping the three themes: Emotional Connection, Human Connectedness and Customization and Creativity, to define a framework of topics and issues to explore in the three forthcoming creative workshops. The members split into three groups and used generative techniques to map ideas and issues, and directions for exploration. The ideas within the maps were then selected by consensus and became the starting points for a series of 'wouldn't it be nice if .' future thinking clothing scenarios. These formed the framework for the formulation of research questions for each theme. The final part of the day was spent concretizing the questions by defining a set of 'need to know' pointers, and suggesting methods of exploration for the 'Explore' workshop.
Creative Workshop 1 | Explore : 6 th April 2005
The first creative workshop was held in the Electrical Engineering Faculty at Imperial College London. The aim of the day was to explore the questions and issues raised in the Open Forum workshop through generative techniques and scenario building. The day was focused on the creative exploration of the social/human interactions, environments, situations, problems and limitations encountered in everyday life situations, which were mapped out into scenarios. The purpose of the scenario-building was to locate meaningful times and places for technological intervention, and the interesting questions and issues that this posed. These interactions and interventions were distilled in timelines and storyboards. Key research questions that arose were explored in the 'Create' workshop. The process was aided by a presentation on fashion, culture and identity by Professor Caroline Evans, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
Creative Workshop 2 | Create : 25 th May 2005
The second creative workshop was held in the School of Informatics at the University of Bradford. The scenarios were conceptualised in this workshop through illustrative drawing work, scripted film shoots of actors/actresses acting-out the scenarios, and through motion-capture work. Access to the motion-capture suite and animation students was provided by the School.
Creative Workshop 3 | Observe : 6-7 th September 2005
This final creative workshop was held at Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol. Stijn Ossevoort, a consultant for Philips and ETHZurich facilitated this two-day user study workshop. Stijn took the cluster group through his process of co-design, using visual generative techniques to explore product solutions. Stijn also took a small user study group through this same process. The user study group was presented with ideas generated by the cluster group during the year, as well as clothing prototypes to demonstrate what smart/electronic textiles in clothing look and feel like. Stijn took the study group through a brainstorm exercise to discuss the questions posed by the cluster group.
Cluster Advisory Group (CAG) Meetings
Each workshop was followed by a CAG meeting, where the previous workshop was evaluated and reflected upon, and directions for the next workshop drawn up.
D421C Conference | 8 th -10 th November 2005
The Lighthouse, Glasgow
D421C One-day Conference | February 2006
London; Details to be announced
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