1. Kombucha Leather

 

 

 

For this project, I completely followed the instruction and did it well. When I took the Kombucha leather out from the water, I applied Morocco Oil on it to prevent it from being dry and paper-like. It still feels jelly-like and smooth now. I really like this kind of material and this experiment. I am considering to make this into a bracelet or a ring, One challenge is about how to keep its moisture, I thought of my professor said that applying oil can keep it wet, so I did this. I am also think about dyeing it next time. I quite like the organic color, but I want to try neon-pink or neon-blue next time to make it more interesting.

 

2. Midterm Reflection

The most challenging part is when I am doing my homework. I often wanted my responses to be perfect and detailed, so it took me a lot of time and energy to finish my homework. I enjoyed learning the knowledges and information of sustainable system. I have never thought about the environment and the resources before I took this class, because I thought it was not my business, but now I realized that as a fashion designer, it is really my responsibility to make my own effort to the environment and society using my own ways. Through this class, I gained a lot of new ideas of how to make the fashion industry more eco-friendly. I felt awaken and my horizon was much more broaden too. I think I can do more, I haven’t reach my limit yet. I can think of new ideas and designs. My professor is a very caring one, she often tried to make us aware that we should do something to make this world a better place. I expect her to teach me more about how to use more method to protect the environment as an artist and fashion designer.

 

3. Regeneration Design

1. I pretty agree with his opinion that mass production and consumption does not have a future, It reminds me of the fast fashion industry that a company can make thousands of clothes every day and a large amount of people like to buy them. The environmental issue the fashion industry caused was very, very serious, so that is why we are taking this class-sustainable system to learn how to make the industry more eco-friendly and sustainable.
2. The moment he realized that he should not design any products with beautiful and luxurious looking to make money but to be more responsible for the environment is that he saw a river in Kyoto with an old washing machine in it in 1990. He was very annoyed at first, thinking why people threw trash into such a beautiful spot, but then he realized that it was a washing machine that was out of date. He started to found out that he was trained to make many decorative designs to make customers buy them to make money, but the old things will keep be thrown away. It was really a very big problem. And as a professor, teaching students to design thins in this way was really irresponsible.
3. If I have to repair my things instead of getting new ones, I surely will cherish them more because I cannot replace them. But I actually have this kind of thing that I used it for a really long time and kept fixing it when it was broken, It is an auto-pencil, I fixed it with my colorful tapes when it got a dirt spot on it. The quality of this is really good. I have used it for almost 4 years. I am still using it now.
4. Bamboo is definitely a great material. In the fashion industry nowadays, using the fabrics made of bamboo is also appreciated because it is much more environmentally friendly than cotton fabrics. I think using materials that are note manmade can all return to “nature cycle”, such as leather, cotton, linen, bamboo, and silk. But I prefer the manmade fur just because taking fur from some rare animals is not good.
5. This is a very good concept, to make the consideration of how it can be repaired when designing an item. But I wonder if it will be hard to consider it when designing. When buying clothes, some of them will attach a little bag with a button or threads in it, in case people damaged it later and want to repair it. But I don’t see many of these kind of little bags nowadays. Maybe it is because of the fact that people will throw the damaged clothes away instead of fixing them anymore.  Maybe it is harder to think about how it will be fixed when designing something now because of this fact, designers may choose to use cheaper but lower quality materials that are hard to be repaired to make things. But I think in the future, people will focus on this issue again. The use of high-quality materials and the time spending on making might help creating less waste. And I think this kind of concept should be widely spread on the internet to create this kind of atmosphere.
6. The first is designers must design something simple that doesn’t use many resources, the other thins is to focus on natural materials. If we are not aware of this when designing the products, it will take a lot of resources producing them, and finally we won’t have anything to use. I totally agree with him, but it is very hard to follow these two points because man-made materials have a really large amount, and sometimes they have many benefits that natural materials don’t have.
7. I like this video because it provides me some new ideas of how the design and how to be responsible to the earth and the future of human beings. I think the fashion industry still have a really large potential to make things right. We really cannot just focus on how much money we can get, and try to make this world a better place.