Abstract:To tackle global sustainability challenges of the Fashion Industry and ensure longterm viability, companies have slowly started integrating circular approaches. This paper explores if and how fashion designers can aid the transition towards a circular economy. For this purpose, 15 interviews with ten fashion designers working in This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ 4.0/),… Show more
“…The authors also witnessed a limited knowledge of designers in sustainable design strategies, processes, or tools and a lack of collaboration inside the company's departments, thus limiting designers' overall impact in tackling the current fashion system. The study has been later confirmed and widened by Cristina Dan & Østergaard (2021) who highlighted organizational, structural, operational, and attitudinal barriers in the context of the designer's role within organizations shifting towards CE, calling for a wider sustainability-related knowledge and systemic organizational changes. Finally, although academic research has expanded the knowledge on sustainable design and suggested different tools over the years, still this theoretical knowledge has not been fully translated into workable industry practices.…”
Section: The Textile Sector and The Evolution Of Design For Sustainabilitymentioning
confidence: 76%
“…This reveals a limited knowledge of designers in framing the sustainability discourse on a broader perspective that includes the social, environmental, and economic domain, so the sustainable design's deeper significance has still to be recognized (Stebbing and Tischner 2015). Also, the designer's role inside the company is limited according to Cristina Dan & Østergaard (2021) who reported organizational, structural, operational, and attitudinal barriers. This calls for three important actions needed to broaden designers' knowledge and impact and address a deeper change into the current fashion system: first of all, the need for a strong focus on sustainability in design education curricula (Vercalsteren et al, 2019); secondly, to increase designers' collaboration inside companies' departments and outside with external stakeholders (Karell & Niinimäki, 2020;Mestre & Cooper, 2017;Ghisellini et al, 2016;Lane et al, 2015); third, a systemic approach.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Finally, although academic research has expanded the knowledge on sustainable design and suggested different tools over the years, still this theoretical knowledge has not been fully translated into workable industry practices. Consequently, an overall consensus evidenced in literature is related to the need for both more stakeholders' collaboration (Karell & Niinimäki, 2020;Ghisellini et al, 2016;Lane et al, 2015;Mestre & Cooper, 2017) and for a systemic approach (Cristina Dan & Østergaard, 2021;Lane et al, 2015;Goldsworthy & Early, 2018).…”
Section: The Textile Sector and The Evolution Of Design For Sustainabilitymentioning
The Circular Economy Action Plan provides a roadmap of actions aiming at accelerating the transformational change required by the European Green New Deal. The textile sector has been identified amongst the industrial sectors recognized of great potential for the reconversion from linear to circular economy. Being one of the world's most globalized, polluting, and exploitative industries throughout its whole value chain, there is an urgent need for the textile sector to make a transformative and radical shift towards a Circular Economy. Since 2015, different Circular Economy actions have been implemented across different industrial sectors and at the micro / meso / macro level, but a systemic and cross-sectoral effort is needed to cope with such a complex challenge. Thus, this paper contributes to the ongoing discussion around the topic of design for sustainability aiming to understand how a systemic design approach can foster the transition towards a circular textile value chain.
“…The authors also witnessed a limited knowledge of designers in sustainable design strategies, processes, or tools and a lack of collaboration inside the company's departments, thus limiting designers' overall impact in tackling the current fashion system. The study has been later confirmed and widened by Cristina Dan & Østergaard (2021) who highlighted organizational, structural, operational, and attitudinal barriers in the context of the designer's role within organizations shifting towards CE, calling for a wider sustainability-related knowledge and systemic organizational changes. Finally, although academic research has expanded the knowledge on sustainable design and suggested different tools over the years, still this theoretical knowledge has not been fully translated into workable industry practices.…”
Section: The Textile Sector and The Evolution Of Design For Sustainabilitymentioning
confidence: 76%
“…This reveals a limited knowledge of designers in framing the sustainability discourse on a broader perspective that includes the social, environmental, and economic domain, so the sustainable design's deeper significance has still to be recognized (Stebbing and Tischner 2015). Also, the designer's role inside the company is limited according to Cristina Dan & Østergaard (2021) who reported organizational, structural, operational, and attitudinal barriers. This calls for three important actions needed to broaden designers' knowledge and impact and address a deeper change into the current fashion system: first of all, the need for a strong focus on sustainability in design education curricula (Vercalsteren et al, 2019); secondly, to increase designers' collaboration inside companies' departments and outside with external stakeholders (Karell & Niinimäki, 2020;Mestre & Cooper, 2017;Ghisellini et al, 2016;Lane et al, 2015); third, a systemic approach.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Finally, although academic research has expanded the knowledge on sustainable design and suggested different tools over the years, still this theoretical knowledge has not been fully translated into workable industry practices. Consequently, an overall consensus evidenced in literature is related to the need for both more stakeholders' collaboration (Karell & Niinimäki, 2020;Ghisellini et al, 2016;Lane et al, 2015;Mestre & Cooper, 2017) and for a systemic approach (Cristina Dan & Østergaard, 2021;Lane et al, 2015;Goldsworthy & Early, 2018).…”
Section: The Textile Sector and The Evolution Of Design For Sustainabilitymentioning
The Circular Economy Action Plan provides a roadmap of actions aiming at accelerating the transformational change required by the European Green New Deal. The textile sector has been identified amongst the industrial sectors recognized of great potential for the reconversion from linear to circular economy. Being one of the world's most globalized, polluting, and exploitative industries throughout its whole value chain, there is an urgent need for the textile sector to make a transformative and radical shift towards a Circular Economy. Since 2015, different Circular Economy actions have been implemented across different industrial sectors and at the micro / meso / macro level, but a systemic and cross-sectoral effort is needed to cope with such a complex challenge. Thus, this paper contributes to the ongoing discussion around the topic of design for sustainability aiming to understand how a systemic design approach can foster the transition towards a circular textile value chain.
“…Designers must integrate materials and design-driven strategies across supply chains rather than limit them to today's system's waste stage. Therefore, a shift in the designer's mindset must be enabled who can maximize, through their action, the sustainable potential of new biobased materials all along the chain [3].…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…160,000 companies (of which 99.8% are micro and small companies), employing 1.5 million people and generating a turnover of EUR 162 billion [16,17]. (3) The authors' organization's knowledge and experience, based on academic study, teaching, networks, projects, and other research and practice carried out by team members in fashion design for sustainability. Section 4 reports results and discussion about the analysis of current industry practices that embeds sustainability and circularity through a systemic approach aiming to transform the industrial material flows by investing in design and knowledge.…”
Fashion industry investments drive the choice for textile solutions characterized by radical experimentation and a firm commitment to sustainability. In the last five years, textile innovations have been strongly related to biobased textile solutions evolving to become effectively feasible and strategic. The produced qualitative knowledge implementations consider new production patterns, innovative technical and digital know-how, and new consumption scenarios. The directions the industry is tracing may provide new opportunities for future textile development in the circular biobased economy. This paper presents a map of current European practices. It discusses the possible passage through a holistic paradigm that goes beyond the boundaries of the old productive systems to accompany the sector towards a new sustainable and transversal state. It also presents three selected best practices that return the actual context in which the phenomenon occurs. A model is presented to demonstrate how these circular processes of biobased materials production enable more process innovations which are developed through implementing the process itself: companies’ search for rethinking and implementing the traditional practices or designing new ones (as determined by the doctoral research of one of the authors).
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