Co-Everything: Defining Co-design for Fashion and Textiles’

Friday 6^th November ‘09

3.30pm – 5pm

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea Millbank

 TFRG / PhD Student Jen Ballie presents:‘Co-Everything: Defining Co-design for Fashion and Textiles’

Co-design is an all-encompassing term to describe participatory action, but how does it fit fashion? This presentation will explore a series of co-design terms and define them within a fashion context, to offer a series of solutions for designers for discussion with the audience.

If you are a undergraduate/ postgraduate student from the University of the Arts, London and have an interest in this area please come along or contact me or more info.

Eco-Home

Aurélie Mossé's Constellation Wallpaper, prototype 2

The Geffrye Museum's Eco Home exhibition is now on until 7th Feb 2009. 'This exhibition hopes to address, without preaching, widespread and increasing concerns about ecology and the state of the planet and how this links to our homes and the way we use, decorate and inhabit them.'' A series of currently available eco-products for the home are on show alongside with few more prospective artefacts such as my Constellation Wallpaper. Jo Angell from Puff and Flock is also displaying her Bittern Wallpaper.
One more good reason to visit the Geffrye Museum which is a charming place to visit anyway !

Future Textiles Denmark

I have been kindly invited by the Centre for Textile Research, Copenhagen to present my work during a research day dedicated to Future Textiles, where I will be presenting alongside with designers and researchers such as Mette Ramsgaard, Linda Worbin or Vibeke Riisberg and many others. Please have a look on the program which sounds really exciting !

If you wish to join us, the event will be hold at:
Multi salen, Københavns Universitet, bygn. 21, lok. 21.0.54,
Karen Blixens Vej 1, 2300 København S and you can already book tickets at this address: mebr@hum.ku.dk, entrance fees is of 100dkk.

Archibots workshop | Ubicomp 2009 | Orlando

Taking part within the larger community of Ubicomp,I recently attended Archibots, a workshop organized by Keith Green and Mark D.Gross dedicated to architectural robotics. The workshop aimed to identify opportunities and challenges in research and education in the emerging area of “Architectural Robotics” - intelligent and adaptable physical environments at all scales, and gathered specialists in the field, from architects to roboticists including designers dealing with interactivity.

From papers review to debates and video-sketching, it was a really enriching day where we have been envisioning what the future of architectural robotics may become in 2019. I was particularly interested in the emerging idea of soft robotics (Omar Khan), what Michael Fox states as the end of Architectural robotics towards the idea of ‘biological robotics’ (Michael Fox). You can catch a glimpse on the extended abstracts of the papers presented as well as the video sketches produced during this productive day. My own paper will be the object of another post.

Hacking Design: Folly, theft or a new democratic dawn?

The RSA will be hosting an event exploring the notion of "design-hacking" a term used to offer alternatives to traditional design, production and partcipation. This event will be chaired by Scott Burnham (author of the RSA Design & Society pamphlet on design-hacking) and invites Dr Otto von Busch "haute-couture heretic and DIY- demangogue".

Dr Otto Von Busch recently completed a PhD which combined a series of projects and experiments to explore fashion activism. His approach invites participants to actively engage in the fashion system and he has created a digital platform called >self_passage< which offers open source projects and proposed solutions. This is an excellent resource for designers practitioners, researchers and fashion DIY enthusiast's.

Event Description
As brave designers embrace this new frontier spirit. Design jam sessions of professional and amateur in cities and festivals all over the developed world unlock a creative energy that has, in fact, been ever-present in favelas and rural villages where necessity has always been the mother of invention.

Is design-hacking merely another post-modern phase in the history of design, or does it reveal a civic ingenuity and resourcefulness that a century and a half of industrially-fed consumerism has masked?

I have just booked tickets and really look forward to attending this event. I will update a new posting to summarise the proceedings.

Book Tickets or Further Information