Flip-through Video of On the Mend: A Designer's Experience of Sustainable Fashion Practices Artist's Book

The United Nations identify that within the next five years, the goal is for everyone globally to have information for everyday sustainable lifestyles. Communication designers are positioned to support this goal by creating cultural meanings, practices, experiences, and particular ways of living. The aim of my project is to develop a climate-centric communication design practice within the case of sustainable fashion consumption. The research questions guiding this work are: What might a climate-centric communication design practice look like? How can climate-centric communication design facilitate everyday sustainable fashion consumption in Metro Vancouver? These research questions are addressed using a Research through Design (RtD) approach. Guided by a critical documentation method, the On the Mend series documents my own designer experience and reflexivity on sustainable fashion consumption through the mediums of an installation in gallery and pop-up settings along with an artist’s book. Further, two zine-making workshops were conducted at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) with seven student designers and visual artists using descriptive qualitative design with content analysis of participant data. Participants explored their individual and collective meanings of what climate-centric messaging and design could include based on their experiences of sustainable fashion consumption. The identified overarching theme ‘footnotes on consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability’ describes how participants balance sustainable practices with convenience and other factors that compete with sustainability. Although a footnote is usually considered as extra and not part of the main conversation, in my research, the idea of a “footnote” is repurposed to be part of the main conversation on how can we live and not harm the planet. “Footnotes” describes how participants experience their successes with sustainability along with the exceptions to engaging in sustainable fashion consumption. The Footnotes* installation reflects participants’ own and collective meanings of ways of being and doing that are not always visible in everyday life or through commercial communication channels. The Footnotes* installation is a collective reading experience of multiple perspectives on sustainable fashion within the three categories of fashion consumption, maintenance, and messaging. Communication design practices such as zine-making can assist designers in uncovering their own individual and community narratives to create a visual language to promote sustainable fashion consumption. A comparison of communication design mediums and settings are discussed in relation to how each contributes to a wider network by facilitating a consistent back-and-forth movement between individual making and community dialogue. In this post-digital era of the information age, where vast amounts of information, technology, and materials are available, the creative direction concepts of “on the mend” and “footnotes” together with the careful choices of messaging, medium, spaces, materials, and design aesthetics are key to the practice of climate-centric communication design. This work may assist designers with the conceptual and practical elements of communication design to navigate the interplay between environmental, economic, and social sustainability together with making sense of the dense information landscape within which designers are constantly moving and that surrounds us everyday.