Socializing Value Creation Through Practices of Making Clothing Differently: A Case Study of a Makershop With Diverse Locals

Abstract

pursued a PhD at Loughborough Design School, exploring how service design can be used to activate textile artisan communities to transition towards a sustainable future. Currently, Francesco is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), sponsored by Neal's Yard Remedies, investigating ways in which design activism can create counter-narratives towards sustainability in fashion.

Fashioning Change: Fashion Activism and Its Outcomes on Local Communities

“…For instance, in Italy, the "Make Yourself…" project led by the "Mode Uncut" network activated a process of social making of clothes in a "makershop" (i.e. a combination of a makerspace and pop-up shop), bringing together "diverse locals" to generate different clothing concepts and bringing about diverse types of value for local fashion production (Hirscher et al 2019). In New Zealand, Jennifer Whitty and Holly McQuillan initiated "The Wardrobe Hack", an individual and modifiable set of self-determined actions, inactions, tasks and exercises designed to deliver power into the hands, minds and bodies of all users of fashion.…”

Interrogating the Value of Design Research for Change

“…Social value can be defined as improvement to the quality of life, especially for marginal groups of people who aspire for 'longer-term, humanistic, and more sustainable ways of living' (Sanders and Simons 2009, 1). This type of value can be created through collaborative design processes (for instance, co-creation workshops where people make things together) aimed at enabling social interactions, integration, and empowerment (Hirscher, Mazzarella, and Fuad-Luke 2019). On the other hand, Sanders and Simons (2009) highlight that engaging people in such social value co-creation processes is challenging as it requires face-to-face participation, real-time interaction, and alignment towards a common goal.…”

The Boundary Object of a Makerspace

“…There was a need to develop such a course in practice and to study the process because although the makerspace movement has made its entry into many arenas in higher education (Hirscher et al, 2019;Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2019;Pettersen et al, 2019;Valente & Blikstein, 2019), some makerspaces are more formalised, while others are more informal. There was an educational need to study how to formalise the course while keeping intact the students' intrinsic motivation in interdisciplinary learning in a university setting, and the development of a course in the transitional space between institutionalised and research-based higher education and the free maker movement.…”