Textile Toolbox
How can we share our sustainable design tools with the world?
Are you a textile or fashion designer? Have you heard about how unsustainable the industry is, but don’t know how to design lower impact products? Wherever you are in the world, whether you are an individual designer/maker selling directly to your customers, or a designer in a team or large department, this site was made by us just for you.
Textile Toolbox is CCD’s web platform project for MISTRA Future Fashion. This open website is a platform for designers and experts to engage with new design ideas. To date this site has been used to help build the discourse around ‘The TEN’. The ten prototypes in the online exhibition space offer new ways to use The TEN; designers have formed their own ‘hand’, or set of cards.
This platform functions as a research and public engagement tool where we explore strategic approaches to design as a driver for change in the textiles and fashion industry. On the site a group of experts from different disciplines offer key case studies and interviews with leading industry stakeholders. Together we considered how to lessen impacts, improve function, and make connections. The focus is on inspirational projects and also on the challenges the industry faces in shifting towards systemic industry change. We challenged aesthetics, process, production and lifecycle issues around products.
The posts on the site and design briefs generated through research workshops and exchanges formed the basis of the online exhibition. The exhibition proposes how The TEN strategies can translate technical, scientific and behaviour research insights into new design concepts. The resulting products demonstrate the potential for progressing a sustainable fashion system with new materials, processes, applications, consumer interfaces and business models. The exhibits are a starting point for discussion – provocations, or ‘provotypes’ – showing us how design tools can create entirely new visions for the future of the industry.
The collaborations with scientists, academics and professionals have led to toolkits for action, instructions for making, resources for learning, and making films to sit back and watch. From summer 2019 the site will be launching all the new tools we have developed for circular design and speed. Watch this space!
