Most garments produced and purchased today are worn only a few times beforebeing discarded. Despite major fashion companies' promises to reuse and recycle,vast amounts of clothing still end up in landfills, or washed up on beaches in theGlobal South.A year ago, Greenpeace Africa activists visited a beach in Accra, Ghana, collecting afraction of the thousands of tons of discarded clothing polluting the coastline. Thesegarments were then sent back to the countries where they were originally sold asnew. From this fraction, three garments were selected as the foundation for theproject “THREE WAYS TO BE COMPLICIT” by Anna Lidström, Gustav Martner, andJonas Larsson.This project uses the garments as artistic material to explore three differentperspectives on our shared responsibility in the environmental crisis and the globalimpact of the fashion industry.

A photographic exhibition and installation, exploring value and expression in everyday materials,traces of use and echoes of life. A conversation around redesign, not as acompromise or reaction to waste, but as a radical, expressive and necessarymovement in contemporary design, blending stylistic and structural qualities ofexisting elements by embracing unpredictability, material scarcity, and improvisation.The exhibition is a visual dialogue, encouraging a creativity shift —a moment wherematerials once considered disposable become signifiers of curiosity andtransformation. It asks: What happens when we stop seeing materials as disposable?How do we situate ourselves in relation to the objects around us? What do theyreveal about our place in the material world?The camera is used as a mediator between material reality and artistic vision, offeringa story of renewal, resilience, and creative ingenuity -a testament to the passion ofmaking things out of things that are already things. An investigation of the tensionbetween old and new, chaos and order, and it pinpoints the thin line between usefuland useless.

This Short Paper is part of the Dialogical Bodies Conference Proceedings, a conference on artistic research in fashion design. Everything and everybody as material, April 2024. The aim of this artistic research is to explore AI in the fashion industry by supporting the design process for the reuse and redesign of recovered resources. Co author, Thomas Nilsson (Ledai)  Founded by Science Park Borås, project Microfabriker (Micro Factories)

This artistic research project delves into the innovative realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology as a tool for analyzing and redesigning garments, aiming to reshape the designer’s approach to sorting and designing based on discarded materials.

When working with redesign, what you have at hand is what you start designing with. The garment as material. No matter whether it is entirely unique or many more of the same exist, the redesign process can be repeated many times if more of the same material is to be found. However, the basic principle is - the material, i.e., the garment, comes first.

Every garment has its own problems and characteristics and shifting classifications – wear and tear, pilling, seams, pockets, colours, stains, prints, linings, zippers etc. Sometimes these hinder the redesign process; sometimes the process originates from these very specific things. When working with discarded garments the actual hands-on sorting from an expressive and aesthetical perspective is a crucial, yet a very complex time-consuming procedure. AI technologies might offer a transformative solution to the challenges associated with manual sorting, since computer vision algorithms can identify fabric types, colors, and conditions and therefore streamlining the sorting process in the recycling facilities. This also points towards novel classifications of these unpredictable, volatile material streams. A development of alternative terminology for expressive properties with aesthetical consequences for design.

In this specific research project 38 shirts have been photographed analyzed and shuffled in 1425 possible combinations. All based on the redesign principal “2 becomes 1” They are displayed randomly, eight at the time, in minor collections to demonstrate the capacities of imaginabledesign alternatives. Further in this ongoing research is the evaluation of “best blends” from a design perspective, and by doing so teach the machine which combinations preferred sor rejected from a designer’s perspective. This needs further research, however - AI's integration into garment sorting and redesign processes holds immense potential for optimizing various stages of a garment lifecycle and simultaneously challenges practitioners towards future spaces of fashion design.

What is particularly interesting is that redesign methodologies tend to be a very analog and craft-based, but with the integration of AI for sorting and redesigning with discarded textiles, this analog and time-consuming process has potential to be challenged and developed not only in favor for local waste streams but also a design tool within fashion practice. An unexplored esthetical evaluation for novel categories and material identities and based on discarded garments.

What if houses could be dressed up to be warm in winter, sail across the road in an autumn storm, and reflect sunlight in summer? We want to investigate the potential seasonal relationships that our Holding Surplus House could have with the sun and the air.Join us for a 5 day workshop on making Seasonal Clothing, dressing up a real Tiny House, and speculating about alternative ways of living.

Text for the exhibition catalogue for the design exhibition ”Sopor är Bra! 2.0" (Garbage is Good 2.0) Rian Design Museum in Falkenberg, spring 2024. The exhibition focus - to draw attention to the need for a circular transition and changed consumption behaviors.

A participatory workshop exploring garments form a two-dimensional form, color and material perspective. Conducted by Anna Lidström & Gudrun Bonér. The workshop is connected to the art gallery's exhibition Mischmasch - 100% everyday drama.

In relation to waste hierarchies, activities such as redesign, reuse, and remanufacturing are often promoted because they can recover more resources than other activities. For example, studies have repeatedly shown that reuse and remanufacturing have more beneficial effects for the environment than recycling on the fibre level. In the clothing and fashion industry there is a growing interest in the design and business possibilities of redesign. However, despite the many examples of redesign practices and research projects being carried out to broaden theoretical understanding, a relatively underexplored area is redesign methodologies and approaches that provide the foundations for redesign as both an artistic field and business model.

This thesis explores challenges for conventional design methods and design thinking in redesign processes and introduces an alternative methodological foundation for redesign. The research was carried out through experimental design research. Design exploration and developments were conducted by design students and the author, who investigated various design methods and redesign processes; the results of these were analysed, as were accounts of and reflections on these, to identify central concepts in design thinking that present challenges and future possibilities with regard to redesign methods.

The results suggest that traditional fashion design processes, methods, and terminology are problematic when designing with garment as materials. Existing methods are based on using garment-materials as sketches, in mood-board-type processes, and as templates for creating garments using other, virgin materials. This research proposes novel ways of understanding the expressive properties of raw materials for redesign, on the basis that things that have already been designed are often then not considered further by designers. On the basis of the theoretical findings, examples of alternative design techniques and tools for redesign are discussed, and fashion as a practice is discussed from a redesign perspective.