Design

Apparel designers are innovators who are uniquely positioned within product creation teams to lead sustainability initiatives. Best efforts for sustainable design fall short because designers lack the comprehensive sustainability understanding, design strategies and tools needed to make effective decisions that have best outcomes for people, planet, and profitability. Interviews and surveys with designers reveal roadblocks to sustainable design. Existing design tools offer partial solutions but lack real world application for the complex apparel creation process. The Apparel Designer’s Impact Tool (ADIT) was created and tested as a potential solution for apparel designers. The tool focuses on integration with existing milestones and processes. Six impact categories form the outline of goals that product teams set together. A case study tests the process of designing with the tool. Each round of audits revealed improvement as questions inspire new design ideas. The T-Shirt study proves success of the tool through improved checklist score and LCA comparison. Potential usefulness of the tool in real world apparel manufacturing is high, pending exporation of each impact category and milestone testing.

In modern society, design and business exists and interdependent parts of a living organism. Such an organism is composed of multiple areas of integration such as branding effect on society and vice versa, the intersection of beauty and function, the social responsibilities of artists, and how design communicates with people. In these areas and others, art and design are seamlessly integrated, both creating in and being created by modern society. My research explores the development and application of design in the context of a living organism,from the idea to the design, and to the completion of a full branding system which includes final samples, branding guidelines, and a website.

In the face of accelerating climate change, this project explores the disconnect between the availability of sustainability resources and real-world behavior change.This project address some of the neurological explanations for this disconnect through the ancient practice of storytelling. Podcasting was used to convey applicable sustainability stories to members of the maker movement. The Maker community has begun to manifest many of the conditions sustainability leaders have speculated as necessary for sustainable futures, and are posed to further serve as cultural sustainability leaders. This project finds that expanding the modes of knowledge acquisition had a positive effect. After members of the user group consumed this podcast, they reported heightened engagement, retention, and willingness to share sustainability stories and resources.