1) Complete your Repair project (steps 4-10)
and post photos of your project on your LP (consider lighting, background etc when documenting) Bring your repair project ready to formally present next week and to explain your process.
Q4: Attempt repair.
A: I did 3 repairs, all used scrap materials. One doesn’t work that well, one is ok, the other one is quite well finished. Attached here are attempt no.1, 2 & 3.
Q5: The third repair was successful, and I’m happy with the result. It is definitely more beautiful than the original piece, because the piece was a scrap, not big enough to make a normal hat, let alone garments. It is more resilient in a way that it can be reused, instead of tossing into trash. With the veil it can even be worn to a cocktail party.
Q6: Though the first repair was not successful, I learnt in the process that with such small fabric, a better way to reuse it is not to sew, but to figure out another way to give it a nicer finish. So I tried sonic bonding, which does not require using thread. This repair (the choker) can be used maybe one or two times, just for fun. But the third repair can last probably a few years.
For the third repair, I used the same idea of giving the fabric a nicer finish, rather than attaching more pieces together to make it a normal big hat. The surprise I encounter is that I didn’t plan to use the veil. It fell out of my scrap materials bag, so I just tried attaching it to the hat, which really elevates the design.
Maybe next time I’ll try attaching the same material together to make it bigger, but actually I like this design better, it’s more unique.
After this project, I do value repair as an important skill. To me, rather than calling it “repair,” I’d call it “re-design.”
Q7: process & results. refer to pictures above and below.
Q8: I think the most important aspect of making a design easily repairable is to use the skills and the materials you are familiar with.
Q9: I don’t have skills on solid materials. An object I currently don’t have the skills to repair are broken bowls or glasses.
Q10: It involves fewer fashion systems, and yes my repair requires fewer materials, even fewer threads.
2) How do you as an artist/designer want to skillfully and creatively meet the challenges presented by the Sixth Extinction? How might this approach, differ from your responses to the Great Acceleration and Anthropocene?
As an artist I could use paints from healthy materials lab and make paintings that encourage people to eat less meat, which aligns with the advice shown on whatsmissing.net. I could also use vegetables/fruits from sustainable farms and use it as a natural dye. Using this natural dye to dye fabrics as a manifestation of supporting sustainable farms.
3) Carefully read the following article on Systems Thinking and Mapping. Bring a printed copy with you to class next week for discussion. How does this kind of mapping seems to differ from life cycle design? What questions do you have about five themes of this article — interconnectedness, synthesis, causality, emergence, feedback loops. Can you think of examples of each? How do you think systems thinking relates to sustainable art and design?
Life cycle design is mainly for making sure the design is worthy of lifelong use. The “manufacturing” and “planned production” parts of lifelong design can be seen as an example of thinking systematically. And the five themes of this article is a more detailed explanation of system thinking. Interconnectedness is what we always say “connecting the dots,” bringing different aspects together to find an innovative solution could be considered the combination of interconnectedness and synthesis; an example of emergence could be fire – there are sparkles, wood, air, heat working together to become flame; an example for balancing feedback loop could be water counters with fire; example for causality could be elements in water counters with elements in fire, so that the result is water can make fire disappear.
Systems thinking in art & design, especially in fashion, is to think about where the materials come from, what results that one single piece would lead to, what’s the relationship between a piece of fabric and water/soil… all in all, it’s useful to use system thinking to see a garment as a whole, organic environment.
4) Learn about Patagonia’s Worn Wear program (Links to an external site.) and FabScrap (Links to an external site.). What is most inspiring to you about these programs? Do you know of others like it? Would you be more likely to buy their clothes after learning about these services? https://wornwear.patagonia.com/how-it-works (Links to an external site.)
Worn wear program is more like a barter program, different from the situation that we use currencies to buy things. It’s a program beneficial for both trade-in and buy-out, making the most of unused objects.
FabScrap offers a solution for dealing with scrap, but at Parsons there are bins for unused scrap. As design students we also trade with peers a lot. So I don’t find the service very useful to me. Maybe FabScrap works with companies or schools like parsons since they have larger amount of scraps.
I would not buy their clothes because I don’t wear or use anything second-hand.