Dialogical Bodies: Everything and Everybody as Material explores how artistic research in the field of fashion (design) practice can negotiate the relationship between bodies and materials. It explores what bodies and materials are—and could be(come)—in fashion design and practice. In doing so, it focuses on different kinds of fashion matter and materiality, including the physical materiality of dressed bodies and identities, to highlight fashion’s sensorial, embodied and affective potential. Through artistic and creative practice research, it underlines the experiential dimensions of fashion, fashion design and fashion practice, opening up alternative ways of making, designing and engaging with fashion.

The increasing inclusion of digital technology in fashion-design practices challenges the established material ontologies that are the result of fashion’s physical-based history. Materiality in the digital does not inherently come into existence with pre-set properties, behaviours, and expressions. How it appears, behaves, and responds is programmable, which fundamentally questions the causal material thinking commonly found in fashion design. It also introduces a dimension of openness and ambiguity as regards the role, purpose, and interactions of materiality that fashion design as a discipline needs to embrace if it wants to create meaningful content using, and for use in, digital environments.

The research programme that the research presented in this thesis followed involved the formulation of an alternative material ontology in digital fashion design; this was based on practice-based experimental activities, which were informed by agential-realism theory. The ontological approach formulated in the programme shifts the focus away from designing objects and towards designing resolutions (here understood as enacted states of how the body, fabric, and space unfold and become intelligible) of material components within phenomena in fashion design. Phenomena are understood as the basic ontological units, in which the body, fabric, and space exist as entangled components. Rather than designing for the human body, using fabrics, and within three-dimensional spaces, the research programme proposes designing resolutions wherein the roles, purposes, and functions of the body, fabric, and space are expressed based on their material performances and enacted using digital technology. Engaging with digital technology that way changes its purpose, from a tool to be used to being part of the designed phenomenon.

Notions, methods, and tools developed within the research programme shift the focus away from making concrete physical products to be worn on the body within socially constructed spaces, and towards the design of resolutions within material phenomena in which the body, fabric, and space equally constitute the design experience through their performative intra-actions. Phenomena-based fashion here does not rely on causal structures of wearing; instead, it more intimately and immediately involves people in the sense of ‘being’ and ‘being part of’, via performative boundaries of digitally enacted material interventions. In this sense, the research programme not only formulates methods for alternative design practices in fashion with digital technology, but also outlines an alternative material ontology that suggests different ways of experiencing, engaging with, communicating, and ‘being part of’ fashion on a material level.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.