Sustainable Fashion Tailoring: An approach for creating a heightened emotional attachment to garment apparel at undergraduate level, through pedagogy, story telling, digital technologies and traditional craftsmanship.

Background: Higher Education undergraduate programmes of study have a responsibility to educate learners within their discipline bridging the gap between further education and industry. Never before has it been so important to equip students who can adapt and accommodate change within their practice responding to external socio-economic, cultural, political and environmental issues. With sustainability a key issue, high on companies agendas, it is imperative that educational institutions also educate its learners to help change the direction of a throwaway and environmentally unsustainable industry. Practice based subjects such as those within the Art and Design and in this case Fashion Design, have a responsibility to not only develop learners competencies with the creative, practical and technical skills required by future employers but also a responsibly in creating informed, socially aware and intelligent mind sets who are able to address global shifts and changes with sensitivity, empathy and creativity. It is widely reported through mixed media channels about the impact fashion and textiles industries have on the the environment and its mass contribution to landfill, pollution, climate change and one of encouraging a throw away consumer behaviour – fast fashion. What strategies can higher education programmes of study implement in order to encourage a practice problem solving approach while still encouraging innovation and creativity within design? In an attempt to counter fast fashion, students were challenged to embrace traditional artisan and craftsmanship methodologies of design and manufacture (slow fashion) combining new digital technologies, while underpinning their work through a consumer-connected narrative. This paper is a case study of four second year undergraduate students on a UK fashion design degree programme who were challenged by the luxury brand Ted Baker to design a collection of men’s formal wear suits that combine sports detailing with traditional tailoring for the brands DNA and their customer demographic. Students were encouraged to fully understand consumer behaviour and the brand ethos while simultaneously learning and developing not only the technical practical making skills of tailoring but also encouraged to embrace and experiment with CADCAM technologies and unorthodox design and pattern cutting methodologies. All students were asked to select an underpinning sports related narrative, linking their concepts to the brand while creating an emotional connection with the consumer through cut, detailing, branding and storytelling. In an attempt to develop a more self and globally aware design student, topics such as form and function, ethics and morals, sustainability, colour theory, marketing, behavioural phycology, semantics and semiotics and global issues affecting deign practice were included within the curriculum. Learners were asked to self reflect while also designing for a specific target market. This project is an attempt to address sustainability through forging an informed relationship between designer, brand, consumer and a heightened emotional connection. Purpose of the research: There were several objectives behind this project linking theory, practice and employability in educating fashion design students at undergraduate level. This project ultimately aimed to create fashion design students who are critical, reflective and informed in all stages of the design process, developing a responsible and empathetic design mentality. It is intended that by educating learners on consumer phycology and global issues affecting design, specifically those created by the fashion and textile industries and their environmental impact, it will generate a solution focused fashion forward design acumen. The project raises the question on whether creating garments with meaning and a heightened emotional connection will encourage a change in consumer behaviour and go one step closer to offering one solution for creating a more sustainable product by increasing its life cycle through a creator and consumer behaviour change. Methods: The project simultaneously interlocks theory, practice and employability in the creation of an informed rounded designer. A wide variety of pedagogy strategies encouraged not only a respect for traditional artisan skills and methodologies (tailoring and design) but also an inquisitive attribute to embrace, experiment and innovate by pushing the boundaries of formal tailoring while exploring and implementing strategies to effectively communicate stories through design and product aesthetics. Pedagogy methodologies included: technical demonstrations, and process inductions eLearning, tutorials, lectures, workshops, factory visit, client pitching, self-directed study and academic tutorial support. Processes to communicate story telling include: tailoring, machine sewing, hand sewing, transformational reconstruction (TR) and traditional pattern cutting, drawing, painting, screen, digital & sublimation printing, digital embroidery, weaving, piping, cording and branding. Research methods include; teaching observation, student interview, outcome analysis and student and client reflection and feedback. Principal Results: This paper will review and analyse the project work created by four selected students, highlighting how the different approaches and design/production methodologies applied to a manufactured product (suit) can not only effectively communicate a narrative but help to create an emotional connection between product, brand and consumer. The results will reveal how traditional skills and new technologies can work harmoniously to help create a perceived luxury product thus encouraging increased product longevity through consumer connectivity, specifically that of sentimentality, patriotism, image and perceived value. The results will evidence outcomes that not only challenge traditional formal menwear tailoring but provide forward thinking design directions for future tailoring, breaking the status quo and providing suggestions for a more individual and personalised approach. Conclusions: The conclusion of this project will include four examples of both 2D and 3D student outcomes in response to an industry set brief, giving an insight into how the outcomes communicate an informed and considered narrative (story), linking designer, brand and consumer. Each outcome will evidence diverse methodologies of communication by embracing traditional and new technologies, approaches and thinking, leading to a deeper understanding and questioning of personalisation within apparel. The outcomes will highlight the importance of the role higher education plays within creating future generations of informed design creatives and how this can be utilised to bring about change within society, consumer behaviour and a products life cycle. Status: Completed

Image Trends in Corporate Environmental Reporting: Bolstering Reputation through Transparency or Widening the “Sustainability Gap”?

As companies discover the monetary benefits of a positive environmental image, a proliferation of green imaging confounds the public sphere. The consequence becomes the disarticulation of terms like environmental excellence, sustainable development, and minimum environmental harm. Because the oversaturation of greening efforts has elicited public distrust, stakeholders need timely and accurate information regarding environmental claims. As a major vehicle for communicating these efforts, corporate environmental reports (CERs) are laden with colorful and sublime images. This study examines the functionality of images found in CERs from 27 industry leaders, applying Sonja Foss’s tenets of visual rhetorical analysis to identify the nature and function of the images and offer an evaluation based on emergent themes. Because images are increasingly important to corporate transparency, the study concludes with several best practice recommendations to serve as ethical image design strategies and to reflect the ways companies address impactful operations

An Assessment of Media Consumers’ Ability to Distinguish the Level of Post-Processing in Journalistic Images

Photojournalists are held to a high degree of ethics because of the importance and impact of their work. To address this, several professional photojournalist organizations and publishers have created guidelines on how to appropriately post-process an image. Today the average media consumer is exposed to a diverse news landscape, and there is a tendency for consumers to trust photojournalistic images as being representative of the truth (Farid, 2006). This research considers to what extent can the average media consumer distinguish between ethically and unethically post-processed images. This study aimed to discover how well people can distinguish between three categories of images when viewing them quickly on their mobile devices. Using a web-based survey, participants were asked to identify various images as either original, enhanced, or manipulated. Original images had post-processing limited to cropping and having the aspect ratio changed. Enhanced images had aesthetic changes and did not attempt or intend to change the content or meaning of the image. Manipulated images either had material added, removed, or significantly changed. Furthermore, the image dataset was annotated to describe broad content characteristics such as people vs. no people and inside vs. outside. A Friedman test with a pairwise comparison with a Bonferroni correction was utilized to determine if there were differences in the percentage correct by semantic categories (People/No People, Indoors/Outdoors) and manipulation sub-categories (Add, Remove, Change). Recruited through social media and word of mouth, 1,919 participants responded to an average of 101 images out of a total of a possible 164, with an average of 1,180 responses per image. Participants were encouraged to provide their first impression. Responses were more likely to label the images as original (53.9%) compared to identifying them as enhanced (30.1%) or manipulated (16.0%). On average, only 36% of the images were correctly identified. Overall, participants’ responses indicated that unless the manipulation was overly apparent or semantically absurd, they believed that the image must be either the original or enhanced

Photography and Social Life: An Ethnography of Chinese Amateur Photography Online

This dissertation explores the ‘middle-brow’ (Bourdieu, 1990) photography practices of contemporary Chinese people in the digital era and how they produce, circulate, and consume photographic images on and off the Internet. Through participant observation and interviews with Chinese photo hobbyists and professionals working in the visual-Internet industry based in London, Beijing, or in the virtual world, it asks how the marriage between photography and the Internet in China has been similar to, or distinct from, its counterparts in the rest of the world, consolidating a vernacular photo-scape that has emerged alongside China’s booming Internet economy and socio-economic transformation over the past forty years. The research further addresses the agencies of both individuals and images, which determine what people want from photography in today’s China and what photography wants from this new networked, mediated society. The dissertation moves across persons, communities, organisations, and real and virtual sites, making it a multi-sited ethnography that traces social relations and ‘the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space’ (Marcus, 1995: 96). The thesis presents a panoramic picture of the everyday practices carried out by Chinese amateur photographers, who are often imagined and categorised as the country’s middle class. The study focuses on two main aspects. The first is the activity of amateur photography, including the conspicuous consumption of photographic equipment and participation in relevant events, as well as social behaviours on and off of Internet photography platforms. The second involves the judgement and appreciation of photographic images on sites such as Tuchong, focusing on various kinds of aesthetic strategies around and within photographic images. The combination of the two has helped photo hobbyists in China to shape their values, career paths, and new identities in the context of digitalisation and the rise of social media

The Visual Novel: Fictional Space and Print After 1900

My dissertation, The Visual Novel: Fictional Space and Print After 1900, examines how and why the novel has assimilated visual mediums—film, art, and the digital—into the genre as a means of adapting to the proliferation of mass media and technology. This project connects a history of the novel (genre) with a history of the book (the genre’s physical form), thereby theorizing and narrating a history of the visual novel. I demonstrate that through fictional space, a critical term used by narratologists and textual studies scholars, visual writing emerges as a hybridized mode of creative composition where we can see most vividly the relationship between author, text, and reader. Characterized by the use of eccentric typography, nonstandard design, and experimental layout, the visual novel relies on text as image by defamiliarizing readerly expectations of print, type, and page space by assimilating composition techniques from the visual arts such as montage and collage. I argue that the visual novel’s multimodality expands definitions of “novel” and “narrative” through a discussion of British and American writers—A. S. Byatt, John Dos Passos, Steven Hall, and James Joyce, as well as contemporary small press editions of works by Laurence Sterne and Oscar Wilde. At times when screen culture advances print’s obsolescence, both historically and more recently, visual writing makes print predominant in the media ecology once again by drawing upon the very technologies that threaten it, and my dissertation responds to this recurrent milieu by arguing that these novelists utilize self-reflexive techniques to create works that actualize print’s potential and the novel’s flexibility

Computational Media Aesthetics for Media Synthesis

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

2017-2018 Course Catalog

2017-2018 Course Catalo

2018-2019 Course Catalog

2018-2019 Course Catalo