Satisfaction and frustration: the well-being experience of homemade knitwear

This paper considers well-being in relation to homemade knitted garments. The topic forms part of a qualitative design research project investigating amateur making as a sustainable fashion strategy. Within this context, well-being is identified as an integral component of sustainability. A small group of amateur knitters took part in the project; they were interviewed individually before taking part in a series of knitting and design workshops with an experienced designer-maker. The process of knitting is widely recognised as beneficial in terms of well-being, offering a source of relaxation, personal satisfaction and social connection. However, knitters can experience frustrations, such as patterns restricting opportunities for creativity. Homemade clothes materialise the making process, and wearing them can create a strong sense of identity and pride. However, the positives of the making process do not automatically carry through to the wearing phase. Homemade clothes are marginal in comparison to the mass-produced norm. They are particularly vulnerable within the context of contemporary fashion, which is already ambivalent in terms of well-being. Despite these issues, the preliminary results of this research indicate that amateur knitters can be supported to work without fixed patterns and achieve wearable results which contribute to a positive sense of well-being

From stitch to society: a multi-level and participatory approach to design research

The aims of this paper are twofold: to describe a doctoral research project that investigated the theme of openness in fashion, and to discuss a distinctive, practice-based approach to design research that emerged through this process. This approach uses the generative processes of designing and making, in collaboration with participants, to investigate research questions at multiple levels: from micro-scale practical challenges to much broader social issues. The project in question explored the potential for opening and altering existing knitted fabrics while simultaneously investigating the role of homemade clothes in challenging the conventional fashion system; it also considered opportunities for amateur knitters to engage in creative design. A series of workshop activities supported the exploration of these areas of interest, with insights relating to each one emerging throughout the process. In this article I have revisited and extended my original contribution to the Research Through Design 2015 conference that discussed this research, adding commentary to frame the project more explicitly in terms of the multi-level approach. I will first describe the research context and activity in detail, before stepping outside this particular example to discuss the potential of this novel approach to design research

Re-knitting: exploring openness through design

This paper profiles a doctoral research project that investigated the idea of openness within fashion in order to understand the relationships between amateur fashion making, well-being and sustainability. The research was conducted through my practice as a designer-maker of knitwear. The primary design activity involved the development of methods of ‘opening’ and re-knitting existing garments. This activity provided a practical platform through which I was able to explore openness at two, increasingly abstract, levels: first, opening my design practice to share design skills with amateur knitters; and second, opening fashion through amateur making. At the conference I will show a sample garment featuring five different re-knitting ‘treatments’, which I produced while working with the research participants. The research produced an extensive re-knitting resource, and a nuanced understanding of the lived experience of wearing homemade clothes in contemporary British culture. Furthermore, the study generated transferable knowledge relating to the reworking of existing items and ways in which this can be supported; the abilities of amateurs to design for themselves and the conditions which encourage this activity; and the changes in practice and identity which take place as we shift between the roles of designer-maker and meta-designer-maker

Shifting perceptions: the reknit revolution

An ongoing initiative seeks to encourage hand knitters to use their skills to rework existing knitted garments, extending product life and contributing to the 'domestic circular economy'. A pilot project demonstrated that inspiration, information and confirmation can help knitters to overcome barriers and embrace the challenge of reknitting

Rethinking the designer's role: the challenge of unfinished knitwear design

The central proposition of my PhD research is to explore the idea of openness within my practice as a designer-maker of knitwear. This focus developed out of my interest in the radical potential of amateur fashion making as a sustainable fashion strategy. While I am exploring the idea of openness on various levels, in practical terms I am designing ways of re-working existing knitted garments. I am testing and developing these methods with a small group of female amateur knitters at a series of discussion and workshop sessions. Opening up my practice brings into question my role as a professional designer-maker. In this paper, I draw on a range of sources to explore ways in which I might address openness, and discuss their implications. Using The Poetics of the Open Work by Umberto Eco, I compare classical compositions with conventional patterns, and consider the potential of ‘works in movement’, in which composer (or designer) and performer (or knitter) become collaborators and co-creators. Having considered these examples, I explore whether a designer could offer support but not authorship. We can describe the design of works in movement as designing actions to be taken by others. Re-knitting requires us to extend this: designing actions to be taken by others, which involve those others – amateur knitters – designing. Several essays in the recent book, Open Design Now, offer ways of thinking about this ‘metadesign’ role. The metadesigner supports the amateur in making design decisions, and developing their skills and knowledge. I describe my experience of working as a metadesigner in the re-knitting project, and the online resource that I have created. I use writing on open source software, a prime example of ‘commons-based peer production’, to discuss the potential of opening up the re-knitting resource to the knitting community in the future. Finally, I discuss how the metadesign role differs from that of the ‘conventional’ knitwear designer-maker, in terms of design activities and relationships with objects and users

Reknit revolution: knitwear design for the domestic circular economy

An ongoing initiative seeks to encourage hand knitters to expand their practices to encompass reknitting: the reworking of existing knitted items using knit-based skills, techniques and knowledge. Reknitting offers potential benefits in terms of promoting repair and re-use by individual users within the domestic sphere, thereby contributing to the "domestic circular economy". Although reknitting was a common element of hand knitting practice in the past, the knowledge of how to open, alter, unravel and reknit has largely been lost. This gap in practice presents a fertile challenge for contemporary knitted textile design. A first phase of activity saw the initial development and testing of reknitting techniques suitable for the garments in our wardrobes today. This project demonstrated that it is possible to engage knitters with reknitting, but that support is needed to overcome barriers to participation and shift perceptions of what is both possible and desirable. Three interconnected elements of support are discussed: inspiration, information and confirmation. A second phase of activity, centered around an exhibition in a public gallery, aimed to communicate the techniques to a wider knitting community. Exhibits included physical garments, a large-scale infographic and a film; adaptable instructions were developed and published on a companion website. Through analysis of these exhibits and instructions, categories within each of the three elements of support were identified to create a more detailed taxonomy of support for domestic reknitting practice. Reflection on the progress of this initiative indicates the direction for future activity: raising broader awareness of reknitting, primarily via online channels, and structuring opportunities for participation to build a mutually supportive community of practice. It is anticipated that the taxonomy of support could be applied to other initiatives seeking to promote domestic circular economy activity

Designing fashion fictions: speculative scenarios for sustainable fashion worlds

The globalised fashion and textile industry is deeply implicated in the devastation of Earth’s life-supporting systems. Industry-led sustainability initiatives have been incremental and inadequate; fundamental change is required to develop an approach to fashion that works within the means of the planet. Potential for transformation is limited by a collective inability to contemplate alternatives to the status quo. A newly established research project, Fashion Fictions, responds to this challenge. It will imagine, prototype and analyse enticing alternative fashion worlds through a playful and collaborative design process in order to research people’s attitudes to the future. A literature review demonstrates that this project is a work of design fiction: an emerging field which takes design from its commercial context to explore political, social and cultural issues via speculative ‘what-if’ scenarios. Yet much design fiction divides the ‘expert’ designer from a passive, voiceless audience. The related fields of interventional anthropology and experiential futures offer critical and methodological guidance for a much more participatory approach, in which designer and participants become co-researchers, learning together about visions of the future. Drawing on these influences, a three-stage process for the research is outlined. A reflective analysis offers an insider view of the first stages of the design fiction project. It discusses the complexities of developing a detailed design brief, which involves the construction of parallel presents, rather than future scenarios; specifies three key parameters that shape the fictions being devised (possible; sustainable and satisfying; based on diverse economies); and identifies various potential sources of inspiration

Writing alternative fashion worlds: frustrations, fictions and imaginaries

The globalised fashion and textile industry is deeply implicated in the devastation of Earth's life-supporting systems. Incremental improvements delivered by recent industrial initiatives have been overshadowed by a dramatic increase in the volume of garments produced and consumed. In contrast, a post-growth approach to fashion would work within the Earth's capacity to support life and requires an uncompromising reduction in resources used in the global North. To achieve this, we need to look beyond specific strategies for design, manufacturing and disposal – which remain the focus of much public, professional and academic attention – to reimagine the entire fashion system. A recently established project, Fashion Fictions, responds to this need by bringing people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems, creating space to explore radically different ways of fashioning our identities. The project’s participatory process for collective speculation has a three-stage structure. Stage 1 generates written outlines of worlds in which invented historical junctures have led to familiar-yet-strange sustainable cultures and systems. In Stage 2's prototyping workshops, diverse groups of participants add complexity to these fictions, while in Stage 3's 'everyday dress' projects, participants performatively enact the prototyped cultures and systems. This paper presents and analyses the 120 short fictional outlines of alternative fashion cultures and systems that were contributed to the Fashion Fictions project between January 2020 and August 2021. Contributors include people with professional and academic fashion knowledge alongside laypeople with interests in fashion and sustainability; just over half of the worlds are written by UK-based contributors, with the remainder written by contributors around the world. The project’s parameters specify that fictions should (a) imagine contemporary realities in parallel worlds, rather than futures in our own world; (b) explore positive and enticing worlds, in terms of individual satisfaction, social justice and sustainability; (c) focus attention on use and associated practices, rather than design and production of garments; (d) be physically possible; and yet (e) think beyond what feels plausible, from the author’s perspective. Guidance, available at writing workshops and via an online tutorial, encourages authors to target a particular frustration of the real-world fashion system, reversing it to create a positive idea, before considering the context for the fiction (e.g. mainstream or niche, local or global) and a backstory to explain how this world developed differently to our own. Worlds submitted include scenarios in which wartime clothes rationing continues to the present day; learning to sew is a teenage rite of passage; and Cuba has become a postcapitalist fashion centre. The analysis presented in this paper provides insights into the range and scope of contributors' imagined alternatives, identifying common themes arising within them and the imaginaries that the fictions evoke. Overall, the paper considers the kinds of sustainable fashion systems the contributors to this project are wishing for, and how far these wishes diverge from the dominant fashion and sustainability discourse