Background:

Our journal article on hybridizing design practices between fashion and game design suggestedpotential for improving academic education in fashion design in the context of its digitalization(Tepe & Koohnavard, 2022). Additionally, the research data of the article - based on conductedinterviews with industry experts - revealed the potential of interdisciplinary setups in whichdigital-native practitioners and haptic practice-based ones could engage in artistic co-creation toeliminate biases and to inform hybrid design practices.

Motivation:

The workshop served as an opportunity to critically reflect with academics associated withdigital game studies and character design on the gathered data around reducing knowledge- andskill-based barriers for mutual knowledge creation. The discussion intended to set the foundationfor collaborations to further investigate the potentials and challenges of hybrid design practicesbetween fashion and digital game design/character design.

Discussion:

The discussion that revolved around the presented data led to defining key points that needfurther research. Doing so could contribute to bringing both disciplines closer together. Thesekey points were ‘accessibility of tools and knowledge,’ ‘shifting material ontologies,' ‘modes oftangibility,’ and ‘computer-human interaction and agency.’ Reflecting on the defined key points,the workshop participants of both disciplines expressed interest in engaging in collaborativeresearch activities to advance this research trajectory.

Digitaliseringen av mode växer fram i allt större takt och under en tid där fysisk interaktion är begränsat. Under de senaste åren har flertalet samarbeten ägt rum mellan mode- och spelföretag, där digitala tvillingar av fysiska kläder skapas och implementeras i spel. Denna förstudie är finansierad av Västra Götalandsregionen och ämnar att undersöka kopplingar mellan mode och spel, dess skillnader och likheter när det kommer till konsumtion och betydelse av digitala respektive fysiska kläder, samt även undersöka samarbetsvägarna mellan dessa två områden och hur samarbeten skulle kunna se ut. Under förstudien har aktörer inom mode- och spelindustri intervjuats och en workshop har hållits för att få en djupare förståelse kring gemensamma intressepunkter och utmaningar. Resultatet har visat att det finns starka paralleller kring kläders representation för både skaparen och användaren i båda världar och att utmaningarna för samarbete dels ligger i tekniska begränsningar, företagskultur och bristande kunskap om det andra området hos respektive område. Resultatet visar också ett växande intresse och behov av hybriddesigner eller hybrida team som agerar som broar mellan dessa två områden.

Light and lighting in fashion and textile design generally relate to the viewing and production of a fashion or textile collection in daylight, or integrating LEDs, electro-luminescent wires, and optical fibres in the structures of fabrics to create a light-emitting fashion or textile collection. This ignores the potential that coloured light as material for design can bring into these disciplines. This paper aims to investigate coloured light as a material for design in relation both to physical environments and immersive virtual reality, and to develop design methods for fashion and textile design that could lead to a re-learning of coloured light as a material for design for developing novel artistic expressions. The first series of experiments focused on addressing the following questions in both physical and virtual reality: How do coloured surfaces and coloured light interact? How do interactions between coloured surfaces and coloured light influence the process of designing surface patterns? To critically examine the results of this research, textile and fashion design undergraduate students participated in a five-day workshop during which they experimented with, and reflected upon different types of interaction between coloured surfaces and coloured light in both physical and virtual reality. The students’ designs showed that the design method provided them with an understanding of the use of coloured light in their design processes through experimentation and individual exploration, demonstrating that this approach can make a fundamental contribution to the development of coloured light usage in various design disciplines.

Digital artefacts

The presented artifacts were developed with an explorative approach in mind to identify possibilities and limitations of Virtual Reality technologies (VR) for designing and experiencing dress. Oculus Quest VR devices combined with immersive 3D sketching applications such as Google Tilt Brush or Gravity Sketch were used as creative sketching and prototyping software to design dress in immersive digital environments. Observations and reflections were made during and afterthe design process with regards to materialities, features, and techniques for designing dress that deviate from designing dress in physical environments. The reflections made, based on observations and comparisons, suggested alternative ways of designing and experiencing dress at the intersection of physical and digital environments that are made possible through VR technology. Designing and experiencing dress as digital content that can be physically engaged with give rise to questions such as how big or small dress could be to be worn, how one could experience digital dress on one’s body or what purpose dress have if they consist of bits and bytes rather than cotton, wool or silk. The presented artifacts and the reflections made suggested fundamental artistic possibilities for digital technology that significantly influenced the development of the author’s research program. 

This research aimed to investigate the transformative potential of digital technology for fashion design when designing dress for physical bodies is no longer restricted to a physical outcome, considering the development of extended reality devices. To critically examine the results of this research, undergraduate fashion design students participated in a five-day workshop, during which they experimented with different kinds of interactions between augmented reality, virtual reality, and CAD software for designing dress. The students’ designs showed that the digital body was used together with digital textiles as equal materials for designing digital dress, disrupting the distinction between body and dress.

The emergence of immersive virtual worlds opens up new possibilities for fashion designers on how to think and design garments for the digital body.

This paper aims: (i) to present a technologically advanced bodysuit for externalizing bodily perceptions of seeing, hearing, and feeling touch towards the outermost layer of the bodysuit, (ii) to then propose and elaborate on the idea of the digital garment as body substitute when bodily senses can get externalized towards non-human body-related materials and further digital materials, and (iii) to argue the findings based on an experiment conducted with participants.

To achieve these aims, it was important to develop a technologically advanced bodysuit that relocates perception areas of the body in the physical reality instead of translating them into the digital reality right away. This is due to the reason that we are desensitized nowadays when interacting with digital bodies as human body substitutes since we encounter such experiences daily through digital media.

Undergraduate fashion design students as participants experienced the relocation of body senses within an experimental setup organized in three phases. In phase one, participants experienced wearing the bodysuit without perception alteration, to then experience the relocation of seeing, hearing, and feeling touch towards the outermost layer of the bodysuit in phase two. In phase three, information from the participants was gathered through questionnaires and group discussions.

The outcomes show that all participants experienced the alteration of seeing, hearing, and feeling touch while wearing the bodysuit. Further, the questionnaires and discussion showed that the participants experienced a shifting understanding from their body-surface towards the bodysuit’s outermost layer. This then led to a new understanding from the participants’ side of the digital garment as digital body substitute which led to new ideas about what designing digital garments could include from fashion designers’ perspectives.

Tepe, J. (2022). Digitalizing Fashion Design Processes. In Fashion is a great teacher (2022) ‘What kinds of fashion education are needed now? a global choir of voices and ideas – special edition from The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education 2021’ Fashion is a great teacher – The fashion education podcast by Renate Stauss & Franziska Schreiber, 10 October, (35’)

The increasing digitalization of fashion design opens up new potentials for designing and experiencing fashion. The study presented in this paper aimed to investigate new potentials for artistic expression by deconstructing the human body into materials for design using technological devices. The senses of sight, hearing, and touch were used as materials for design by creating a distance between these stimuli and the body's surface and relocating them to the surface of a bodysuit that was designed for this purpose. Undergraduate students participated in the study by exploring bodily perception from the perspective of fashion design in a workshop. The findings of the workshop suggest potentials for fashion designers to use technologies as design tools for designing dress beyond the textile surface by turning the human body, in terms of bodily senses, into material for design.

Digitising design processes incrementally reduce the degree to which designers bodily engage with materials to design garments. While extended reality technology such as augmented and virtual reality could address the lack of bodily involvement in digital design processes, they have yet to resonate with fashion designers in academia and the industry to be fully included. The presented research aimed to explore extended reality technology as an enabler of ‘interspaces’ that mediates bodily experiences and interactions of engaging with digital material based on spatial and technological affordances. The emergent design spaces allowed for varying degrees of bodily engaging digital materials. Reflections made on workshop-based design activities with extended reality technology suggested that hybrid design spaces allowed for translating craft-based design activities commonly reliant on intricate human body movements, such as knitting and draping, into digital ones. They further suggested that bodily engaging with digital content in an immersive manner can lead to higher degrees of considering wearability and interaction-based body-dress relations during design processes. The findings of this research can contribute to the discourse on digitising design practices within fashion as they open the space for thoughts about what may get lost when solely engaging in digital design processes that are streamlined for specific ways of working. The suggested use of extended reality technology reintroduces messiness through bodily engagement that may contribute to engaging with digital technology in fashion design beyond factors like efficiency and productivity toward more diverse and versatile digital and hybrid-based design experiences. 

Advances in digital and augmented reality (AR) technology create opportunities for more body-diverse methods of designing dress. However, while the clothing industry uses such technologies to explore digital venues in promoting its designs, most designs are made to resemble physical garments for the same body types. This research aimed to investigate alternative morphological relations between the physical human body and digital dress to enable more body-diverse design practices within the field of fashion. A three-day workshop was conducted with undergraduate fashion design students to critically examine the hypotheses of this research. The students were tasked with using three-dimensional scanning, computeraided design (CAD), and AR technology to design digital dress-related designs for different body shapes and sizes. The performative act of projecting digital dress onto a physical body created wearable poly-body dress expressions, the morphological qualities of which were experienced by the participants simultaneously physically and digitally. The participants described their experiences as turning the body and dress into designable poly- body expressions, and changed their perception of the body in relation to dress. In addition to walking around ‘inside’ the designed items, i.e. using them as pieces of clothing to cover the body, the participants were also able to walk around ‘inside’ of and interact with designed items as they would an architectural space. The fashion system can benefit from artistic investigations of digital and AR technology for creating dress alternatives that may contribute to a more diverse and inclusive appreciation of body-dress expressions.

Body-centric design disciplines that utilize digitization processes such as fashion are tasked to engage with theoretical concepts commonly applied in digital-native design disciplines in order to use digital technologies as more than simple tools. Guided by intra-action theory, alternative ontological and hierarchical relations between the body and textiles were explored by digitally translating their movement. An installation was developed to find hybrid body-textile expressions using motion-capture sensors and robotic arms. The findings suggest that technological augmentations of the body and textiles can increasingly be diffracted in terms of their apparent physical-material boundaries through movement translation. Movement data functioned as a performative mediator, expanding movement-based expressions from one agent to another. Body-textile hybrids emerged from this process, and shaped each other in a mutual act of becoming, challenging ontological structures of the body and textiles commonly applied in fashion design.

Collaborations between fashion and digital game design practitioners are intended to provide new fashion-related experiences in digital worlds, yet often result in garment designs that resemble physical equivalents rather than constituting innovative experiences. This research aimed to investigate possible criteria for developing digital design practices in higher education in fashion design that are informed by industry experts’ experiences of fashion and digital game design. Specialists from both industries were interviewed to investigate how fashion design practices can create meaningful content for digital worlds. The findings suggest that fashion design practitioners in higher-education need to better understand the technical and socio-dynamic peculiarities of digital worlds to create meaningful fashion-related outcomes, rather than recreating physical fashion in the digital realm. The findings further suggest that fashion designers would benefit from learning about digital software, tools, and methods that are shared by digital-native design disciplines to allow for connected workflows. 

The prevalent body-dress paradigms in fashion education and industry primarily consider the physical interaction of the human body in relation to the textile material. This needs to be further investigated due to the ongoing digitalisation of the fashion system, which often results in a limited understanding of design methods with regard to how the body and dress influence each other. The research presented in this article aims to challenge the prevalent body-dress paradigms in fashion design by suggesting alternative methods for designing in the digital space using the human body and textiles. In this research, we investigated the artistic potential for fashion design by inverting the prevalent body-dress movement paradigm using motion-capture technology. A mixed-reality installation was developed as a design tool and used as a sketching method to translate textile movement in physical space into human-body movement in digital space. Alternative body-textile expressions were recorded and analysed based on sketching methods. The findings suggest that the resulting physical and digital bodily forms created possibilities for designing alternative types of dress, beyond jackets, shirts, and trouser. The findings contribute to the fashion design field in both academia and industry by suggesting alternative body-textile expressions as the starting points and criteria for designing dress from a different perspective than is commonly practiced. This could support designers in creating alternative types of dress that are not predominated by established characterisations of dress in the fashion field.

The presented artifacts were initially developed within the framework of an experimental exploration with the aim to identify possibilities and limitations of ideating dress designs in immersive virtual space. Virtual reality technology in terms of Oculus Quest devices, in combination with Google Tilt Brush as immersive sketching software, was used for this endeavor. Observations and reflections were made during and after the design process with regards to materialities, features, and techniques for designing dress. The findings of the observations made, with regards to the listed criteria, are visually captured in the displayed artifacts, provoking an alternative understanding of what dress could be when designed and experienced through extended reality technologies such as virtual reality devices. The presented artifacts and the reflections made further suggest fundamental artistic possibilities for digital technology as a concept, method, and technique in fashion design.

The role of the artifact in this research practice is guided by Nithikul Nimkulrat’s definition of artifacts in artistic-based research practices (Nimkulrat, 2013). Artifacts as inputs serve as a potential starting point from which research questions are formulated or serve as the means to provide data for analysis from which knowledge is constructed. As outputs, artifacts serve to indicate whether identified research problems require reformulation or drifting, as well as strengthen findings articulated in the written output. Thus, artifacts are regarded as an elemental part of knowledge construction and communication by reflecting on the artifacts during and after their production.

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.