Meaning before Making: How digital tools might enable material and immaterial value for sustainable design

Abstract

This paper explores the use of propositional design and digital tools for sustainable material and immaterial value creation in fashion design. Stuart Walker argues that within the current capitalist system, it is ‘virtually impossible for the discipline of design to effectively and substantially address the interrelated issues of environmental responsibility, social obligation and personal meaning’ (Walker, 2013). Propositional design objects are not design solutions but are concerned with ‘challenging conventions, positing questions, and offering directions for reform.’ Walker calls this ‘non-commercial, academic, research-based designing’ (Walker, 2013) propositional design. Alongside the increasing drive for more sustainable systems for fashion, digital tools have begun to change the way that fashion design is enacted. There has been a significant shift from the traditional physical craft skills of pattern cutting and sewing, to the use of software and digital spaces, used in tandem with the traditional fashion design studio environment. Software such as CLO3D allows for accurate patterns to be created digitally, emailed, and exported anywhere with an internet connection. Together with the changing context of the fashion industry and the growing desire to reduce waste, lower consumption, and redefine our relationship to clothes, these digital spaces provide new ways of thinking about and creating value. Propositional design approaches free the fashion designer to venture beyond aesthetics into systems-led thinking for radical sustainable change.