Visit the Emotional Wardrobe Blog

Themes

The three themes we have identified are emotional connection, human connectedness and customisation and creativity.

Emotional Connection

Social concern to be addressed: Research has highlighted consumers' deep dissatisfaction with the 'stress and spend' culture of millennium Britain. Increased affluence and enhanced standard of living has not resulted in an increased sense of well-being, and people are looking beyond consumerism for things that give life meaning, enhance experience, and emotional connection with products. Hence, consumers want, among other things, to feel good about their purchasing behaviour. Additionally, they are increasingly worried about the connected problems of waste, globalisation and sustainability.

Area to be explored: Clothing is an emotional medium; it can serve to reflect, hide or generate mood. Currently, clothing products apart from visual and in some cases tactile stimuli are dumb and are not responsive to people and/or their moods. There is awareness in the ICT sector that computer system design needs to broaden to address social interaction and emotive expression. By integrating technology and design methodology from both approaches and merging them with fashion's emotional context and its proximity to the body, emotional connection to technology and fashion may be enhanced.

Human Connectedness

Social concern to be addressed: Advances in communication technology have provided new forms of messaging, such as email and text messaging, which aid personal and business communication. We believe that the development of this area will be defined by social practices, e.g., nobody predicted the huge uptake of text messaging and the integration of the technology within garments and an interactive environment.

Area to be explored: Clothing is a communicative medium. The marriage of design and technology in the 21 st Century will require designers to design interactions , between people, places and information . Currently, remote communication is facilitated by a variety of digital tools, such as voice and text messaging, email and web pages, but these methods are limited in their emotional or affective expression. Experimental research has been conducted around wearable technology, but the approach has been one of 'boxes in pockets', with cumbersome technology near to but not comfortably coupled to the body. By bringing sensor and network technology to the body in an integrated way, new forms of non-verbal communication will be enabled.

Customisation and Creativity

Social concern to be addressed: Prescriptive learning processes and outcomes contained in the National Curriculum (also seen in HEIs) are not encouraging students to be individual creative thinkers. This has serious implications for the next generation of professionals in the developed economies where, for instance, the notion is taking hold that in the future ideas and concepts as well as material goods will be traded. It will be imperative to develop people who think in lateral and creative ways.

Area to be explored: Clothing is an expressive medium; it facilitates individualistic expression, allowing individuals to differentiate themselves and to declare their uniqueness. Currently, the designer and producer largely define a product's function and its aesthetics; even commercial customisable products have a narrow menu of options . By approaching technology from a fashion and clothing perspective, new paradigms may evolve. It is proposed that a fusion of fashion and technology could enhance fashion's interactive, expressive and creative possibilities. Clothing aesthetics that can be dynamically personalised by the individual, could empower the wearer and encourage new ways of creative thinking through aesthetic, informative and gaming explorations.