DESIGN & EXPLORATION

INTRODUCTION

BODY & REFERENCES

CONCLUSION

As a fashion designer, I did my mandatory studies, worked for a fashion company and actually found a job within the field I studied. Still I had this feeling of something missing. I felt detached from the material I was working with on a daily basis. While I was expecting the people wearing clothes to be more aware of the work, knowledge and resources hiding in one garment, I myself did not feel connected enough with the most important component of clothing, textiles. Out of this lack of connection grew the longing to be more close to the creating process of the materials that I was working with.
I decided to go back to school and do a master studies in Textile Design. The idea I had was simple: I wanted to become a textile designer. The aim of learning the century old textile techniques felt good, and I thought it would be as simple as that to become a textile designer. I just had to learn the techniques like weaving and knitting (1) and that is that. Soon I learnt there was much more to being a (textile) designer. By being more close to the source of textile and its making techniques like weaving and knitting some things that I was missing as a fashion designer were satisfied. But now new questions arose: Where does the territory of the craftsman end and where does the territory of the designer start? What does it mean to be a (textile) designer in 2021, and how could the role of a (textile) designer look like in the future? What is the role of a designer in society anyway? What are my duties as a maker and how can I combine my personal morals & ethics, when it comes to the future of this planet, with being a designer?

The theme of this paper is Design+Exploration. Through attending the webtalks of the Design Museum Gent - Design Dialogues (2) a new world of design practices opened up to me. The practices of the invited designers and design studios stood sometimes in vast contrast to the well-known practices of today`s fashion houses. As a fashion designer nowadays you are embedded in a fast pasted 4-season cycle (3), that leaves no room for profound research and rethinking of the current system. Whilst fashion as a subject on its own actually touches a lot of environmental and sociological relevant themes and issues, the system rather requires new trends instead of meaningful changes and innovations. Working as a designer for Christian Wijnants between 2014 – 2017 I was experiencing the switch from producing 2 collections a year to 4 from close by. More than logically this lead to a work practice that demands efficiency to its top. Therefor twice a year fashion designers from all over the world attend the fabric and yarn fairs Première Vision in Paris (FR) (4) and Pitti Filatti in Firenze (IT) (5). All materials from buttons, to textiles, to zips, to leather and yarns that are needed to make a collection can be found in these huge exposition halls. This is the closest you get to the production processes of textiles and yarns. Which literally means visiting a 4m2 booth, in a huge airconditioned hangar, where fabric and yarn suppliers try to sell you the newest trends and materials on 20x20cm swatch cards. They can tell and sell you whatever, the more sustainable and recycled the salesman talk sounds the better. Of course in the end the minimum order quantities and the price actually have the last saying.

1.)

2.)

3.)

Première Vision - Paris (FR)

one of the biggest fabric fairs that are held bi-annuali in Paris, where all the people from the fashion industry go to select their fabrics

Pitti Filati - Firenze (IT)

one of the biggest yarn fairs that are held bi-annuali in Firenze (IT), where all the people from the fashion industry go to select their yarns for knitting and weaving.

In contrast to the design studios that presented and discussed their works in the Design Dialogue Talks, the majority of fashion designers do not take the time to do profound research or explore more deeply a material or shape or subject. The pressure of having to participate in this fast pasted fashion environment makes you being satisfied when finding a 100% wool fabric for 10€/m instead of actually asking yourself where the wool comes from, who shore, spun and wove it. It is in fact a mirror of how we as consumer nowadays are detached from the objects and products that surround us in our daily lives. Especially the textile products, that play a big role in it. Shoppers are rarely questioning where the fiber of their newly bought white jersey cotton t-shirt grew and who picked it and knitted into a piece of fabric. Let alone that they know the difference between knitting and weaving or how a cotton plant looks like.

There are though fashion designers who aim for a new approach to fashion design. In 2012 Bruno Pieters (6) started his label Honest By and was aiming for radical Transparency from the origins of the fibers to the manufacturing and distribution of garments. But soon he was proven that the consumer was not ready for this move yet. He closed the doors of his studio in 2019.
I am wondering why a sector like fashion where everybody is talking a lot about innovation and avant-garde, does not succeed in integrating a more explorational and profound research practice and actual innovative ways of producing and distributing garments. In fashion you are breaking the rules if your models wear Crogs (7) on the catwalk during Paris fashion week. Furthermore are fabrics that are produced with recycled PET bottles (8) seen as the sustainable solution whilst its demand actually increased the production and use of plastic bottles. So what is it that the fashion sector and the textile designers closely linked to it, can learn from other design practices? Is it literally a lack of time or the absence of urgency that there is no rich research or does it have to do with an attitude of not wanting to actually bring change into the system?

4.)

5.)

6.)

7.)

8.)

8.)

Maybe at first when referring to the word Exploration we think about the big explorers from the so-called Age of Discovery which started in the early 15th century and continued into the 17th century. I think about Christopher Columbus & Vasco da Gama (9) who were in the real definition of the word people who travel to places where no one has ever been in order to find out what is there . What was it that motivated these adventurers to leave their well-known lives and homes behind and go on courageous and dangerous explorations without knowing where they would be sailing and with the constant risk that their investigations could end in their death?
I assume many designers can relate to this longing of literally wanting to see places that no one has ever seen before. But there is more to that, there is this inner curiosity that I guess also the explorers could refer to as an eagerness and necessity to inspect unknown materials, subjects, crafts and techniques and by this actually hoping to in some way or another participate in making the world a slightly better place.
For this paper I am focusing on 6 designers and design practices that in my opinion have some things in common with the ancient old explorers. These studios are: Formafantasma (10), Christien Meindertsma (11), Studio UNFOLD (12), Atelier NL (13), Amandine David (14) & Hella Jongerius (15). By analyzing their projects, reading and listening to interviews about their work I try to further understand their way of designing. By doing this I might even hope to understand better my own path as a designer. Like Egon Schiele said: „Ich bin durch Klimt gegangen bis März. Heute glaube ich bin ich der ganz andere“.

For analyzing the work of these studios I listed a few keywords, with which I structure their way of working. The individual analyses you can find or reference number (16).

• TOOLS & MEDIUM
o Which kind of helping tools, materials and mediums do they use to explore certain topics, techniques and material?
• PROCESS
o How do they structure their process?
o Are there laid-out paths or is it a rather unstructerd work process?
• MAIN MOTIVATION TO DESIGN
o What thrives these designer to look beyond well-known crafts, materials and ideas?
• OUTCOMES
o Do their outcomes actually have similarities to traditional designed objects?
o And what is actually the design in such a practice?
• STORYTELLING
o What do they actually want to say with their designs?
o Is the end object or outcome a story they tell, an exposition, a series of pictures or does it always result into a physical object?
 

9.)

10.)

11.)

12.)

13.)

14.)

15.)

16.)

As a textile designer I am often confronted with the different value connotations of handmade versus anonymous industrial produced objects. Nowadays in fashion and textiles, objects that are artisanal produced are often seen as more valuable than non-artisanal produced products. This trend is creating a certain elitism and fetishism of objects. There is a thin line between actually valuing crafts and craftsmanship and at the same time to not romanticize it. Crafts is not a static thing, it develops with the times. We live in a century that is marked by fast digital and technological progresses. Studio Unfold is a good example of a Design Studio that perfectly integrates new technologies within their design practice without losing the hand of the maker and by this actually succeed in the fusion of ancient old crafts and new technologies. For their project Via Binarii (14) they investigated on distributed manufacturing versus centralized manufacturing. The outcome of the project resulted in creating a network and framework for small decentralized ceramic 3-D printing manufacturing places that spread all over the globe.

Exploration of traditional Crafts vers. Digital Crafts (Studio Unfold)

Exploration of Materiality (Christien Meindertsma)

Design can be used as an indirect education tool. One of Christien Meindertsma main motivations to design is actually to produce complete transparent objects. By this she is indirectly teaching the end-user in a subtle way everything that comes along with a certain object. To start a project she is often focusing on a material. Then she explores the whole production chain from the raw material to the final production of an object. This way of designing not only values the whole entourage behind the making of a product, it also takes away the status of the “star-designer”. Her “design-explorations” can result in a more traditional seen design object like a chair (Flax Chair) (15) and moreover it can have very different outcomes, like a Tweed Fabric (Fiber Market – Donegal Tweed) (16), a flashmob (The collected knitwork of Loes Veenstra) (17) or a book (PIG-BOOK) (18). There is one common denominator that can be found throughout all her projects; the end products are not just utilitarian or physical objects. Meindertsma literally succeeds to integrate in every output the whole process and story behind an object or subject itself. Somehow her interest which isn`t the aesthetic of a material or a product itself but actually the story behind, results in objects that trigger a curiosity within the consumer.

Exploration of Production Chains (Formafantasma)

Another struggle which we can face as students of art schools is the fact that the institution offers a safe haven which exists in a kind of parallel universe next to the real world. Only after graduating you kind of find yourself in a reality check of what it means to be a designer. Formafantasma`s approach to design has encouraged me to dwell more deep into the industry behind textiles (or any other field) already during my studies. In their eyes Design is a discipline that is dirty. Dirty not in a bad way but in a sense that it is embedded very much in the industry. This actually offers many opportunities once you are aware of it. The industry produces all the goods that surround us in the everyday life and therefor actually provides a direct tool to shape reality. Nonetheless they pledge for a more holistic approach to design and production. By unraveling the different production chains from within the industry they try to find new approaches of manufacturing. Their current exposition Cambio (19) is a good example of their investigative design approach.

Exploration of Localness (Atelier NL)

“Looking at things that are unseen” is the main motivation of Atelier NL. Starting point of their projects is often to explore their closest surroundings for materials and resources that are never looked at. With their systematic research they shed a light on local materials like clay, sand and earth, to explore the roles of these substances in everyday objects. The end products of their projects often turn into very approachable utensils and tableware. One of their main tools and at the same time result of their explorations is the archiving of the material research which they visualize in subjective maps in the material they are investigating on (Polderwall) (20). This opened my eyes to a different approach on how to source materials. Hereby the focus lies not on producing a specific product but actually looking into an available local raw material and let the material decide what will be the outcome of it.

14.)

15.)

16.)

17.)

18.)

19.)

20.)

Exploring the division of roles between Designers & Artisans/Craftsmen (Amandine David)

As a designer Amandine David locates herself on the crossroad of traditional crafts and digital practices. One interesting outcome of her practice is the nomadic residency program Hors Pistes (21) where she creates together with other co-founders a framework in which designers and craftsmen/artisans are invited to create together. Within this framework you can clearly see that the goal of this nomadic residence is to blur the boarders between artisans and designers and to generate a creative exchange that is rarely seen in the bigger industry. The traditional splitting of roles is questioned. Everyone involved in the process becomes author and maker at the same time. These collaborative processes can be considered as an object of design itself. In other words; the outcome of David`s work and research is to create these processes. This shows that design does not need to result in a physical object but can also be a framework for others to create within.

21.)

Exploring perceptions of quality (Hella Jongerius)

Hella Jongerius approaches Textile as a material that does not require to design an object from scratch. She explores textiles in a way in which it actually can serve as an exchangeable skin, which can transform an existing designed object into a new design (22). Furthermore she investigates on the industrial production processes of textiles, since one of her main motivations is to “change something from within the industry, even if it is just a small step, because that can later grow into a big thing” (23). In her practice she is developing methods to apply artisanal processes into industrial once. She refers to industrial produced textiles as very perfect and anonymous surfaces. “But if you want people to actually connect with a (textile) object, the production processes need to integrate more imperfections which implies human life”. With this she is shifting and questioning the conception of quality. She states that quality is often measured by the longevity of a color or the lastingness of a fabric. Once the color has faded or the fabric is worn out, people think it has no value anymore. With her approach she is trying to change this in her opinion misconception of quality.

22.)

23.)

Throughout my 2 years study at KASK my perception of design has changed and broadened. The boarders between craftsman & designer and artisanal versus industrial produced became more clear resp. blurred out. Also the seminar Design: Expanding Mind has helped me a lot in finding answers to many questions I had when starting with my bridging year in 2019. Certainly I have realized why the work within the fashion industry left me feeling more empty than that it actually fulfilled me.

All of the above design practices try to blur the boarders between artisans, craftsmen & designers and digital and analog. The roles of designers and producers are getting more and more entwined, on big as well as on a small scale. I am curious to apply certain design tools which I discoverd during this analysis within textile researches. Formafantasma`s conception of design being a dirty discipline (24) confirms my believe that design should not be handled with care. In a fast changing world with a growing population and probably many (climate changes) challenges to face, as designers we should not be afraid of putting our hands in the mud and actually dwell and explore areas and things that often stay unseen for many. I am curious to see in which direction the fashion industry will develop and whether a more connected and conscious involvement within the production process could change the fashion dogma.
Being an explorational designer without knowing what will be the output of a research is somewhat an approach that needs a lot of patience, endurance and most of all an open gaze to actually uncover the invisible. The most important is actually the attitude (25) that defines a designer and maker. And with this comes the understanding of the necessity of exploration.

24.)

25.)