DRAFTS:3 invited more than 80 researchers and designers to discuss the role of artefacts in research and design activities within disciplines such as fashion, textile, and interaction design. Specific to the third iteration of DRAFTS, researchers and designers contributed material and immaterial artefacts to the exhibition with the aim of framing discussions around the role of artefacts in communicating knowledge. The various schools of thought that the participating researchers and designers follow, allowed for a multifaceted dialogue to emerge, suggesting various approaches to communicating knowledge through design research artefacts.

This multifaceted dialogue was expressed through three events across two venues: A ten-day research exhibition was held at designtransfer in an international collaboration between the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany and the University of Borås, Sweden. 45 design researchers from various academic institutions across Canada, Germany, Iran, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Romania Sweden, and the United Kingdom showcased their work together.

A symposium was held at designtransfer that invited all participating exhibitors to present and discuss their perspective on the role of artefacts in communicating knowledge in relation to their exhibited projects. The dialogue that emerged was further deepened by two keynote presentations, which were held by Sarah Kettley, Professor of Material and Design Innovation at University of Edinburgh, Scotland and Daniëlle Bruggeman, Professor of Fashion at ArtEZ - University of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

A one-day pop-up exhibition was held at the Berlin Open Lab that featured the work of 36 students enrolled at various academic institutions in MA Fashion Design, MA Textile Design, MA Costume Design, MA Product Design, MA Design & Computation, MA Spiel & Objekt, MS Physics, and BA Fashion Design to exhibit their projects in the context of the DRAFTS:3 theme.

Together, these events suggested various perspectives on questions relevant to DRAFTS:3: What is an artefact? What roles do artefacts play in design practices and research? How do design practitioners and researchers communicate ideas and knowledge through artefacts? What are the possibilities and challenges of artefacts when communicating ideas and knowledge? What do design practitioners and researchers need to mind for framing the role of the artefact in this context?

All contributors to the three events suggest varying perspectives to these questions on the following pages. These perspectives may show similarities to one another, or challenge each other. Together, they are a time stamp of evolving perspectives on the role of artefacts in practicing and communicating design and design research.

In textile design education, material expressions tend to be directed toward visual-tactile sensory domains. Yet, materials are perceived by all senses, as the body’s experience is mediated through multiple sensory modalities. This paper presents an experiential learning workshop designed to introduce textile design students to somaesthetics as a way to increase sensory competencies and enrich the exploration of sensory-material expressions in textile design. Teaching methods involved a sensitizing exercise, a reflective sense collage, a collaborative sense map task, and a final design task. An evaluative discussion is based on workshop feedback by the students and reflections by the researchers. The main contributions of the paper are guidelines as an inspirational source for introducing sensory-material aesthetics in textile design education.

Fashion is primarily a visual ontology consisting of definitions, theory and methods that are based on visual language. This research revises fashion by approaching it from a different – sonic – perspective wherein sound is considered as an intrinsic part of the wearer’s experience. This research opens new avenues for design thinking with ears rather than eyes. This article briefly introduces the research methods I have used to collect and reflect clothing and fashion from the perspective of listening rather than seeing, sounding rather than showing, and is a form of rethinking and redefining fashion by starting with the statement that dress is sound. The dressed body is considered to be a temporal form that is expressed within the sound. This article presents a study of collecting different sonic expressions of clothing, accessory and footwear; analyzing and grouping the sonic expressions – developing sonic fashion archive into a sonic fashion library.

Fashion is primarily a visual ontology consisting of definitions, theory, and methods that are based on visual language. My research revises fashion by approaching it from a different-sonic-perspective wherein sound is considered not as a negative aspect but as a potential source of a new theory and method. Sound is presented not as a secondary quality of designed objects, but as the main idea-generator. An investigation into sonic expressions is seen as a disruptive fashion practice and could be described as a process of unlearning – encouraging one to leave behind pre-existing knowledge of fashion expressions by focusing on something else when defining and designing. The research addressed a gap in knowledgethrough the Sonic Fashion Ontology, which constitutes new, foundational knowledge of sonicexpression. The research findings challenge existing theory with new terms, definitions, methods, and tools, and show the importance of understanding fashion as a platform for new knowledge production and critical thinking, along with unlearning and rethinking preconceptions of what dress is and could be. 

Experimental artefacts are central to my research as they are intended to generateideas and design methods, which were developed within embodied sound practices. In myresearch, the artefact suggests the direction of a proposed programme and methods for de-signing sonic expressions. The knowledge of sonic form and expression is explored and developed through the research artefacts. The research artefacts inspired thought processes and resulted in an alternative theoretical approach. The artefacts are considered not as design products themselves, but as ‘research archetypes’ (Wensveen and Matthews, 2015, p. 8) and ‘evocative objects’ (Su and Liang, 2013, p. 612; Turkle, 2007, p. 71). The research artefacts, such as the sound-tools (Sound to Wear) are the intermediary knowledge, the ‘bridging concepts’ (Dalsgaard and Dindler, 2014, p. 1635) that connect the embodied sound practices and theory. They exist ‘midway’ between instances and theories, intermediate knowledge that captures and materializes thinking. 

Fashion is primarily a visual ontology consisting of definitions, theory, and methods that are based on visual language. My research revises fashion by approaching it from a different-sonic-perspective wherein sound is considered not as a negative aspect but as a potential source of a new theory and method. Sound is presented not as a secondary quality of designed objects, but as the main idea-generator. An investigation into sonic expressions is seen as a disruptive fashion practice and could be described as a process of unlearning – encouraging one to leave behind pre-existing knowledge of fashion expressions by focusing on something else when defining and designing. The research addressed a gap in knowledgethrough the Sonic Fashion Ontology, which constitutes new, foundational knowledge of sonicexpression. The research findings challenge existing theory with new terms, definitions, methods, and tools, and show the importance of understanding fashion as a platform for new knowledge production and critical thinking, along with unlearning and rethinking preconceptions of what dress is and could be. 

Experimental artefacts are central to my research as they are intended to generateideas and design methods, which were developed within embodied sound practices. In myresearch, the artefact suggests the direction of a proposed programme and methods for de-signing sonic expressions. The knowledge of sonic form and expression is explored and developed through the research artefacts. The research artefacts inspired thought processes and resulted in an alternative theoretical approach. The artefacts are considered not as design products themselves, but as ‘research archetypes’ (Wensveen and Matthews, 2015, p. 8) and ‘evocative objects’ (Su and Liang, 2013, p. 612; Turkle, 2007, p. 71). The research artefacts, such as the sound-tools (Sound to Wear) are the intermediary knowledge, the ‘bridging concepts’ (Dalsgaard and Dindler, 2014, p. 1635) that connect the embodied sound practices and theory. They exist ‘midway’ between instances and theories, intermediate knowledge that captures and materializes thinking. 

 The discourse surrounding intangible materials in interaction design is often directed toward

computational materials [2, 9], however, this studio focuses on sonic and electromagnetic fields as

intangible materials with distinctive qualities and methods of interaction. Participants explore the

notion of extended body by augmenting their natural hearing abilities through body-space-object

interactions. Using analog and radio-frequency (RF) sonic extenders, participants direct, block,

amplify, and filter sounds, and perceive the surrounding electromagnetic landscape, thereby

creating a “super sense” of heightened audition. This sonic experience explores the sensorial

possibilities of the future body, where aural augmentation could take place. Using soundwalking

and soundmapping as methods, participants explore transitive sonic forms that change their

qualities and content over time in downtown Sydney. Participants produce a collective soundmap

identifying embodied sonic extensions and acousmatic techniques, along with movements,

gestures, and choreographies. This data will be used to stimulate a final discussion.

Fashion is primarily a visual ontology consisting of definitions, theory and methods that are based on visual language. This research revises fashion by approaching it from a different—sonic—perspective wherein sound is considered not as a negative aspect but as a potential source of a new theory and facilitator of the evolution of new methods. Sound is thus presented not as a secondary quality of designed objects, but as the main idea-generator. The research opens new avenues for design thinking with ears rather than eyes. This thesis explores clothing and fashion from the perspective of listening rather than seeing, sounding rather than showing, and is a form of rethinking and redefining fashion by starting with the the statement that dress is sound.An investigation into sonic expressions is seen as a disruptive fashion practice, and could be described as a process of ‘unlearning’—encouraging one to leave behind pre-existing knowledge of fashion expressions by focusing on something else when defining and designing processes. That something else is sonic expressions. By rethinking the dressed body as a matter of sound gestalt, this research goes beyond existing communication models in fashion design to examine sonic language, wherein foundational definitions play a central role and form the basis for the new practice. The research was designed to facilitate the exploration and design of sonic expressions.The research addresses an identified gap in knowledge through the Sonic Fashion Ontology, which constitutes new, foundational knowledge of sonic expression. The research findings challenge existing theory with new terms, definitions, methods, and tools, and show the importance of understanding fashion as a platform for new knowledge production and critical thinking, along with unlearning and rethinking preconceptions of what dress is and could be. Furthermore, the results have implications for ways of thinking in design in relation to e.g. diverse communities such as the visually impaired.

The dress is a part of constructing and defining our identity. As a form of visual communication, clothing is a powerful means of making statements. Currently, fashion design products are developed based on the transmission of an image, referred to as a ‘culture-screen’, which makes the interaction process focused on the visual experience. Although sound, touch, and smell are elements of clothing, the visual sense is predominant in fashion and fashion education, and fashion is essentially understood as a system of visual components. As an alternative to this dominant focus on visuality, fashion could be explored as a sound-based interaction between the body and dress. The existing study of sound ontology in fashion is limited; thus, it is a largely new and interesting territory to be potentially explored. What is a sonic identity in the field of fashion? My research Aesthetics of the Invisible: Toward a Sonic Fashion Ontology is widening the notion of what aesthetics is by developing a new direction for fashion design on non-visual aesthetics based on sonic expressions. The sound is considered as a design-thinking material and an alternative, experimental way of defining a form for a silhouette. The sound installation Noisy Bodies is a part of the research practice–Sonic Fashion Library. The Noisy Bodies consist of 40 selected sound records of clothing, shoes, and accessory. The audience is invited to explore an acoustic dimension of fashion by listening to this sonic collage.

Aural experience and sound thinking, in contrast to visual experience and image thinking, change the fundamental manifestation and perception of a dressed body: from looking and being seen to listening and being heard. Looking at and listening to a body that is wearing high heels are fundamentally different experiences. Although sound is an element of dress and identity, the visual sense is predominant in fashion and fashion education, and fashion is essentially understood to be a system of visual components. As an alternative to this dominant focus on the visual, this research investigates the sonic aspects of fashion, approaching them as largely unexplored and potentially interesting ontological alternatives with which to create an understanding of fashion that goes beyond visual stimuli.

The primary aim of the research presented in this thesis was to develop an introductory programme for sonic fashion that suggests a shift in focus – from visual perception and appearance to sonic. The programme consists primarily of ontological theory components: methods, tool-shifters, terms, definitions, and categories.

The research was conducted through investigations of sonic dress and sonic expressions, which were approached as interactions between the body and dress that occur during the act of wearing. Sonic aspects were explored on a fundamental level – i.e. the natural (physical) sounds of dress – in a manner that is relatively unprecedented in the fashion field, and so the research was experimental and speculative.

Knowledge regarding sonic expressions was collected using sound-based thinking in the form of listening/sounding research artefacts, which raised ontological questions; What is a sonic silhouette? How a sonic silhouette is created?

The research was conducted by exploring, recording, and systematising sounds arising from body-dress and dress-dress interactions, as well as speculative experimental workshops with students and case study involving people with differing seeing abilities.More generally, the research broadens our conception of fashion aesthetics by presenting a new direction for the fashion design field; a non-visual aesthetic that is based on sonic expression, wherein sound is considered to be a design/design thinking material and an alternative way of defining a silhouette.