Promoting sustainable Indian textiles: final report to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), London, UK

In 2009, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), through the Sustainable Development Dialogue (SDD) fund, backed the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) at London College of Fashion and Pearl Academy of Fashion (PAF), New Delhi to run a project to promote Indian sustainable textiles. Improving patterns of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in India and the UK is one of the agreed areas for collaboration under the UK-India Sustainable Development Dialogue. The project is also part of a body of work taking place under the Defra Sustainable Clothing Roadmap, which aims to improve the sustainability of clothing. Defra has identified that ‘while an economic success story (globally worth over £500 billion) the industry has a significant environmental and social footprint across its supply chain.’ The Roadmap aims to improve the sustainability of clothing by gathering a robust evidence base of impacts and working with a wide range of stakeholders, to build on existing interventions. For more details on the roadmap see: http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/business/products/roadmaps/clothing/index.htm This report is only one of the dissemination tools associated with the project. The project film, images and website should be viewed in conjunction with this report

The Challenges of the European Automotive Industry at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Summary of the main findings of the CoCKEAS project

The paper presents the main conclusions of the CoCKEAS European project (Coordinating Competencies and Knowledge in the European Automobile System). It analyses the main changes in the organisation of the European automotive system, not only in the relationships between carmakers and their first tier suppliers, but also in the relations they have with the other actors (upstream and downstream). It discusses the issues associated to the intangible dimension of this industry (financialisation and services), its new geography, and, finally, its distinctivness compared with is competitors (USA and Japan).: automobile industry, Europe, financialisation, interfirm relationships, Japan, location, modular production, services, system, USA

Revamping Buffalo State Fashion and Textile Technology’s Runway Production

Runway is produced by Buffalo State’s Fashion and Textile Technology Department and Fashion Show Production class. This project explores new ideas for the annual Runway fashion show, featuring the creation of a year-long project that is supported by two fashion merchandising courses. This project will include the creation of FTT 189 Fashion Styling and revamp FTT 452 Fashion Show Production courses. In addition to the redesign of Runway, this project also discusses the process of collaboration with the Fashion and Textile Technology Department faculty, other departments and Buffalo State students

Storytelling for older adults in online social networks with novel web technologies

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

Mapping and Developing Service Design Research in the UK.

This report is the outcome of the Service Design Research UK (SDR UK) Network with Lancaster University as primary investigator and London College of Communication, UAL as co-investigator. This project was funded as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Network grant. Service Design Research UK (SDR UK), funded by an AHRC Network Grant, aims to create a UK research network in an emerging field in Design that is Service Design. This field has a recent history and a growing, but still small and dispersed, research community that strongly needs support and visibility to consolidate its knowledge base and enhance its potential impact. Services represent a significant part of the UK economy and can have a transformational role in our society as they affect the way we organize, move, work, study or take care of our health and family. Design introduces a more human centred and creative approach to service innovation; this is critical to delivering more effective and novel solutions that have the potential to tackle contemporary challenges. Service Design Research UK reviewed and consolidated the emergence of Service Design within the estalished field of Design

Flexible product platforms

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 155-162).The research contributes to the uncertainty management of engineering systems by proposing and demonstrating a way to implement flexible platform strategy to respond to future uncertainties. In today's competitive market, where market segments are becoming more fragmented, pressure to develop and market diverse sets of products is increasing. To meet such market needs and reduce production cost at the same time, product platform strategy has been implemented in several different industries. Using a core set of common platform elements and variant-specific unique elements, a family of products can be produced to satisfy various market segments. However, the growing cost of platform development and undesired side effects of the strategy (e.g. performance tradeoff, cannibalization) is forcing companies to design their platforms with flexibility, so they can accommodate product variants, differentiate these variants, and be economically flexible to respond to specified future uncertainties. This thesis introduces a design process to architect flexible product platforms. The proposed process is demonstrated in two automotive application case studies.(cont.) In the first case study, a vehicle floor pan is designed to satisfy two different length requirements, while being economically robust to future specification change and component demand. The second case study investigates a vehicle platform, where the flexible body in white (BIW) platform is designed for a family of three vehicle variants through identification of critical elements subset. Results showed that the flexible BIW platform is less profitable than the inflexible BIW platform, but when the degree of future uncertainty increases, the flexible design eventually becomes more profitable. This research provides additional examples that yet again confirms the general proposition "flexibility gains value as the degree of uncertainty increases."by Eun Suk Suh.Ph.D