An Approach to Sensibility Design in Fashion

Alvin Toffler (1980) mentions that although the 20th century was focused on information and technology, the 21st century is the age of sensibility. A demand for the development of a sensibility design has been voiced through an increase in the creation of a lifestyle based on products suitable for individual sensibility. Acknowledging the relevance of consumer sensibility and product design, the current research for sensibility design has become significantly active in both the fields of academia and the industrial world

A study on the design development of gloves for fire investigations

The role of firefighters at the scene can be separated into various activities such as fire suppression, rescue, investigation, etc (Hine, 2004). A firefighter\u27s personal protective equipment has been regulated according to performance and design requirements that are standardized to protect body parts from potentially dangerous elements at the scene. In the case of fire investigations, since the administrative purposes for arranging fire prevention and countermeasures are emphasized, studies mostly focus on the schemes or operations while the importance of studies on the design of protective equipment has been largely overlooked(Kim & Park, 2014; Ko & Lee, 2009). Hence, the aim of this paper is to clarify fire investigators\u27 design needs for their fire investigation gloves and to determine key design elements which could provide the best compromise between protection and work efficiency. The study manages a living lab, which is a research concept of a user-centered, innovative co-operating system, often conducting wear trials and in-depth interviews with advisory groups (Bergvall-Kareborn & Stahlbrost, 2009). The study selects 6 types of popular fire investigation gloves from four nations (USA, Japan, Germany, and Korea). In order to examine differences between gloves in more detail, wearer trials and in-depth interviews were conducted with 3 fire investigators drawn from South Korean based fire stations on November 4th and December 17th 2015. Also, a survey was conducted on 313 fire investigators from November 29th to December 21th 2015, to analyze the design needs for their gloves. Finally, a prototype of the fire investigation gloves was developed and a wearability evaluation was carried out on 33 fire fighters to assess the satisfaction levels of the design and functions of the gloves. In general, protection and work efficiency issues were identified as a major concern regarding the fire investigation gloves. The gloves need to protect the hands in case of potential hazards from sharp objects found while filtering through ash and to still maintain the tactile senses of the fingertips to pick up tiny objects. Also, there were demands for a design to allow the gloves to be taken off and put on easily in cases where the investigator has to frequently report to base during identification activities. The study helped develop a design prototype that utilized an adjusting device onto a band long enough to cover the wrist area, included a weaved in dyneema knit with polyethylene thread which is light and strong, and applied a polyurethane coating on the palm area to create gloves for fire investigation specializing in identification through enhanced cut resistance and dexterity. As a result of conducting a user evaluation on the prototype through Living Lab, 50% of the respondents found the strength of the gloves to have increased compared to the existing ones and the inconveniences when wearing the gloves had improved overall

Development of High Performance Firefighting Gloves Prototype Applied to Ergonomic Design

The aim of this paper is to clarify firefighters’ design needs for their firefighting gloves and to determine ergonomic design elements which could provide the best compromise between protection and comfort

Boosting hot electron flux and catalytic activity at metal-oxide interfaces of PtCo bimetallic nanoparticles

Despite numerous studies, the origin of the enhanced catalytic performance of bimetallic nanoparticles (NPs) remains elusive because of the ever-changing surface structures, compositions, and oxidation states of NPs under reaction conditions. An effective strategy for obtaining critical clues for the phenomenon is real-time quantitative detection of hot electrons induced by a chemical reaction on the catalysts. Here, we investigate hot electrons excited on PtCo bimetallic NPs during H-2 oxidation by measuring the chemicurrent on a catalytic nanodiode while changing the Pt composition of the NPs. We reveal that the presence of a CoO/Pt interface enables efficient transport of electrons and higher catalytic activity for PtCo NPs. These results are consistent with theoretical calculations suggesting that lower activation energy and higher exothermicity are required for the reaction at the CoO/Pt interfac

Synergistic Reversal of Intrahepatic HCV-Specific CD8 T Cell Exhaustion by Combined PD-1/CTLA-4 Blockade

Viral persistence is associated with hierarchical antiviral CD8 T cell exhaustion with increased programmed death-1 (PD-1) expression. In HCV persistence, HCV-specific CD8 T cells from the liver (the site of viral replication) display increased PD-1 expression and a profound functional impairment that is not reversed by PD-1 blockade alone. Here, we report that the inhibitory receptor cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen-4 (CTLA-4) is preferentially upregulated in PD-1+ T cells from the liver but not blood of chronically HCV-infected patients. PD-1/CTLA-4 co-expression in intrahepatic T cells was associated with a profound HCV-specific effector dysfunction that was synergistically reversed by combined PD-1/CTLA-4 blockade in vitro, but not by blocking PD-1 or CTLA-4 alone. A similar effect was observed in circulating HCV-specific CD8 T cells with increased PD-1/CTLA-4 co-expression during acute hepatitis C. The functional response to combined blockade was directly associated with CTLA-4 expression, lost with CD28-depletion and CD4-independent (including CD4+FoxP3+ Tregs). We conclude that PD-1 and CTLA-4 pathways both contribute to virus-specific T cell exhaustion at the site of viral replication by a redundant mechanism that requires combined PD-1/CTLA-4 blockade to reverse. These findings provide new insights into the mechanisms of virus-specific T cell dysfunction, and suggest that the synergistic effect by combined inhibitory receptor blockade might have a therapeutic application against chronic viral infection in vivo, provided that it does not induce autoimmunity

Analysis of user perception and fashion image on a stripe pattern for men's shirts by using semantic network analysis

In regards to clothing, a stripe pattern is used universally in all countries because it does not go out of style, nor does it get boring as it portrays a simple and clear image compared to other abstract patterns (Park, 2005). In fashion design, ongoing research is being carried out on the stripe pattern and the evaluation of its visual image. Research has shown that diversity in shape, width, stripe gaps, and coloration leads to a difference in the clothing fashion image (Choi, 2014). However, most of the previous research of stripes and their fashion image has been carried out through quantitative perception surveys with stimuli and scaling systems which are set by the researchers. Even though several of the surveys have shown various levels of success, it is not possible to measure the quickly changing perceptions of various users as fashion trends quickly come and go. As a solution, word-of-mouth (WOM) has been proven to be useful in social media, a real-time communication platform that is on the rise, showing a high correlation between the perception and evaluation of consumer products (Walsh & Mitchell, 2010). Thus, the study applied a semantic network analysis, which is an effective technique to extract the content of messages from online texts and indicates a network of semantic relationships between keywords, to examining various users' real-time responses. The study also analyzed users' perceptions and the representative fashion images of men's striped shirts. The study selected "Men's Striped Shirts" as the search parameter and collected a total of 17,516 online Blog posts from Naver (www.naver.com), the most popular portal website in Korea, over two periods: November 2010 to October 2011 and November 2015 to October 2016. The specific research process went as follows. First, a social matrix program called Textom 2.0 was used to collect posts from the two time periods. Also, 70 noun and adjective keywords related to the design and fashion image of men's striped shirts were derived through frequency analyses. Secondly, Ucinet6 (Borgatti et al., 2002) was utilized for centrality analysis based on the co-occurrence of selected keywords and extracted representative fashion images of men's striped shirts. Thirdly, keywords used in the networks from each period were collected and an investigation of the change in users' perceptions through linked distance and the degree between adjective keywords (e.g., basic, simple, etc) and design keywords (e.g., style, color, fabric, pattern, etc) was conducted. Firstly, the analysis of the key words' frequency and the degree centrality concluded that of the two periods, 'casual (0.24%, 0.026)' and 'classic (0.13%, 0.014)' were the most relevant fashion images of men's striped shirts. Secondly, a network analysis on classic images showed that adjectives such as 'basic', 'simple', and 'quality' were effective. During the time period from 2010 to 2011, the relevancy of 'basic' style, the color 'white' and 'simple' patterns were very highly regarded. However, from 2015 to 2016, awareness of a 'customized' product and 'quality' fabrics were on the rise. An analysis of casual images revealed that from 2010 to 2011, 'stylish' and 'street' styles; the colors 'blue', 'black', and 'red'; 'comfortable' fabric; and 'striking' patterns were mainly discussed by users. During the time period from 2015 to 2016, users' usage of 'cute' and 'sporty' in style, and 'light' and 'soft' in fabrics become noticeably increased. The aim of this research is to analyze the fashion image of the striped pattern on men's shirts through users' social media text data. The proposed method, semantic network analysis, enabled us to extract and summarize the changing design perception of users in line with its conceptualization. It can be seen that continuous research of social media analysis on fashion design that predicts people's demands and readily responds to those demands can become a vital area of research. Moreover, the semantic network analysis method used in this study will provide new guidelines for big data usage in the area of fashion design.</p

A study on the comparison between two approached on fashion trend analysis

The fashion industry in the 4th industrial revolution era is shifting to a paradigm that predicts and responds to consumer demands. Big data technologies are especially receiving an increasing amount of attention in the field of fashion design. Massive user data accumulation allows designers to make more accurate predictions for the latest seasonal fashion trends. A recent study on fashion trend analysis through IT technology was published in 2015 (Lin et al., 2015). However, since the study was accomplished in the field of computer information, the results of data analysis are derived in a biased way. The purpose of this study is to examine traditional trend analysis methods and big data analysis methods in both domestic and overseas’ fashion studies and also to propose a research method for analyzing user-oriented information on fashion design trends to supplement the limitations.</p

Sportive Fashion Trend Reports: A Hybrid Style Analysis Based on Deep Learning Techniques

This study aimed to use quantitative methods and deep learning techniques to report sportive fashion trends. We collected sportive fashion images from fashion collections of the past decades and utilized the multi-label graph convolutional network (ML-GCN) model to detect and explore hybrid styles. Based on the literature review, we proposed a theoretical framework to investigate sportive fashion trends. The ML-GCN was designed to classify five style categories, “street,” “retro,” “sexy,” “modern,” and “sporty,” and the predictive probabilities of the five styles of fashion images were extracted. We statistically validated the hybrid style results derived from the ML-GCN model and suggested an application method of deep learning-based trend reports in the fashion industry. This study reported sportive fashion by hybrid style dependency, forecasting, and brand clustering. We visualized the predicted probability for a hybrid style to a three-dimensional scale expected to help designers and researchers in the field of fashion to achieve digital design innovation cooperating with deep learning techniques

Conceptual framework of hybrid style in fashion image datasets for machine learning

Abstract Fashion image datasets, in which each fashion image has a label indicating its design attributes and styles, have contributed to the achievement of various machine learning techniques in the fashion industry. Computer vision studies have investigated labeling categories (such as fashion items, colors, materials, details, and styles) to create fashion image datasets for supervised learning. Although a considerable number of fashion image datasets has been developed, different style classification criteria exist because of a lack of understanding concerning fashion style. Since fashion styles reflect various design attributes, multiple styles can often be included in a single outfit. Thus, this study aims to build a Hybrid Style Framework to develop a fashion image dataset that can be efficiently applied to supervised learning. We conducted focus group interviews with six fashion experts to determine fashion style categories with which to classify hybrid styles in fashion images. We developed 1,206,931K-fashion image datasets and analyzed the hybrid style convergence. Finally, we applied the datasets to the machine learning model and verified the accuracy of the computer’s ability to recognize style. Overall, this study concludes that the Hybrid Style Framework and developed K-fashion image datasets are helpful, as they can be applied to data-driven fashion services to offer personalized fashion design solutions

A study on the design development of gloves for fire investigations

The role of firefighters at the scene can be separated into various activities such as fire suppression, rescue, investigation, etc (Hine, 2004). A firefighter's personal protective equipment has been regulated according to performance and design requirements that are standardized to protect body parts from potentially dangerous elements at the scene. In the case of fire investigations, since the administrative purposes for arranging fire prevention and countermeasures are emphasized, studies mostly focus on the schemes or operations while the importance of studies on the design of protective equipment has been largely overlooked(Kim & Park, 2014; Ko & Lee, 2009). Hence, the aim of this paper is to clarify fire investigators' design needs for their fire investigation gloves and to determine key design elements which could provide the best compromise between protection and work efficiency. The study manages a living lab, which is a research concept of a user-centered, innovative co-operating system, often conducting wear trials and in-depth interviews with advisory groups (Bergvall-Kareborn & Stahlbrost, 2009). The study selects 6 types of popular fire investigation gloves from four nations (USA, Japan, Germany, and Korea). In order to examine differences between gloves in more detail, wearer trials and in-depth interviews were conducted with 3 fire investigators drawn from South Korean based fire stations on November 4th and December 17th 2015. Also, a survey was conducted on 313 fire investigators from November 29th to December 21th 2015, to analyze the design needs for their gloves. Finally, a prototype of the fire investigation gloves was developed and a wearability evaluation was carried out on 33 fire fighters to assess the satisfaction levels of the design and functions of the gloves. In general, protection and work efficiency issues were identified as a major concern regarding the fire investigation gloves. The gloves need to protect the hands in case of potential hazards from sharp objects found while filtering through ash and to still maintain the tactile senses of the fingertips to pick up tiny objects. Also, there were demands for a design to allow the gloves to be taken off and put on easily in cases where the investigator has to frequently report to base during identification activities. The study helped develop a design prototype that utilized an adjusting device onto a band long enough to cover the wrist area, included a weaved in dyneema knit with polyethylene thread which is light and strong, and applied a polyurethane coating on the palm area to create gloves for fire investigation specializing in identification through enhanced cut resistance and dexterity. As a result of conducting a user evaluation on the prototype through Living Lab, 50% of the respondents found the strength of the gloves to have increased compared to the existing ones and the inconveniences when wearing the gloves had improved overall.</p