Fashion Thinking: Fashion Practices and Sustainable Interaction Design

IntroductionBroadly defined, "fashion" refers to the symbolic, aesthetic, and cultural meanings that objects carry, especially the ways in which people use objects to express their taste, lifestyle, social status and belonging to a community. We don't ordinarily think of fashion as a positive force for sustainable practices in the design of products and services. One imagines that fashion drives consumption and premature obsolescence at the expense of efficient use of resources. At the same time, fashion exists in various aspects of our lives and plays an essential role in shaping consumption practices (Sassatelli, 2007). Also, fashion-oriented design encourages ingenuity, imagination and innovation (Walker, 2006), which are crucial elements in pushing forward technological and social progress. In this paper, we ask a design research question about whether it is possible to re-conceptualize fashion so as to help designers make sustainable practices natural and fashionable. In other words, is it possible to embrace fashion as a fundamentally human predisposition in a way that is also in harmony with the need to ensure a sustainable future?To drill down into some of the specific questions underneath this large area of inquiry we ask: How does the notion of fashion affect consumption practices, especially with respect to devices and energy-intensive services made especially with respect to information technology devices and serves that are resource-intensive or use scarce materials? Is there a way to embed fashion into design to facilitate and promote sustainable practices, generally? Is there a way to incentivize businesses and policymakers to create business models or policy so as to target fashion demand for sustainable rather than unsustainable consumption, especially the consumption of products and services in which HCI and interaction design are implicated?Our interests are in the arenas of fashion, sustainability, and HCI. Specifically, we are interested in understanding ultimate particular acts within the everyday practices of individuals in relation to the things they treasure. We are interested in multiple levels of this relationship, including affect, form and function. By ultimate particular acts, we refer to Nelson and Stolterman's (2000) notion of design's concern for the "ultimate particular" rather than the general. Moreover, our goal is to imagine if and how each ultimate particular act could become fashionable to a larger community, as a means of promoting more sustainable practices. We approach this goal by examining everyday consumption practices in order to understand the complexity of fashion and how fashion functions in everyday life; we do not focus on fashion in the sense of quantitatively assessing the popularity of current trends or understanding how marketers predict or control fashion trends.In the context of the everyday, "fashion" is much more than what is called the fashion industry, which deals with apparel, although that is a substantial part of the global economy (Black & Eckert, 2009). It can also include categories such as luxury items, cosmetics, bottled water, as well as aspects of furniture, housing, and automobiles, for example, that are not strictly aimed at satisfying actual physical needs but are aimed at social signaling. Through interviews described in this paper, we begin to examine the role of fashion in choosing personal electronic communication devices. Given that fashion is a relatively new topic in HCI, we also draw upon diverse fields such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and social practice theory. This work provides an initial background for interpreting our interviews and for our efforts to conceptualize fashion and its relationship to digital consumption and sustainability.The general program of study guiding this paper is the hypothesis that fashion might be reconceptualized as a force for sustainability, rather than unsustainability. …

[1]  Kate Fletcher,et al.  Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys , 2008 .

[2]  Daniela Karin Rosner,et al.  Reflections on craft: probing the creative process of everyday knitters , 2009, C&C '09.

[3]  Pamela Jordan.  Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques , 1994 .

[4]  Eli Blevis,et al.  Luxury & new luxury, quality & equality , 2007, DPPI.

[5]  Elaine M. Huang.  Building outwards from sustainable HCI , 2011, INTR.

[6]  Saul Greenberg,et al.  One size does not fit all: applying the transtheoretical model to energy feedback technology design , 2010, CHI.

[7]  Phoebe Sengers,et al.  Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCI , 2010, CHI.

[8]  Jeffrey Bardzell,et al.  Interaction criticism and aesthetics , 2009, CHI.

[9]  Donald A. Norman,et al.  Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research vs. Technology and Meaning Change , 2014, Design Issues.

[10]  Richard Howard,et al.  The Fashion System , 1983 .

[11]  Sue L.T. McGregor,et al.  Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics , 2008 .

[12]  A. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. , 1992 .

[13]  Thorstein Veblen,et al.  The Theory of the Leisure Class , 1901 .

[14]  Allison Woodruff,et al.  A bright green perspective on sustainable choices , 2008, CHI.

[15]  Bill Tomlinson.  SUSTAINABLY OURSA call for pro-environmental conspicuous consumption in the online world , 2008, INTR.

[16]  Eun-Young Jang.  An Analysis on Cases of Fashion Collaboration Strategy , 2006 .

[17]  Tiffany Holmes,et al.  Eco-visualization: combining art and technology to reduce energy consumption , 2007, C&C '07.

[18]  B. Pfeffer.  What Things Do Philosophical Reflections On Technology Agency And Design , 2016 .

[19]  Yanqing Zhang,et al.  Unpacking social interaction that make us adore: on the aesthetics of mobile phones as fashion items , 2011, Mobile HCI.

[20]  Ron Wakkary,et al.  A sustainable identity: the creativity of an everyday designer , 2009, CHI.

[21]  Diana Crane,et al.  Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing , 2000 .

[22]  M. Douglas,et al.  The World of Goods , 2021 .

[23]  Robert J. K. Jacob,et al.  Introduction to special issue on the aesthetics of interaction , 2008, TCHI.

[24]  Erik Stolterman,et al.  The Case for Design: : Creating a Culture of Intention , 2000 .

[25]  Eli Blevis,et al.  Sustainable millennials: attitudes towards sustainability and the material effects of interactive technologies , 2008, CHI.

[26]  Johnny Rodgers,et al.  Challenges in sustainable human-home interaction , 2011, XRDS.

[27]  Yuniya Kawamura,et al.  Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies , 2004 .

[28]  E. Stolterman,et al.  How Deep Is Your Love : Deep Narratives of Ensoulment and Heirloom Status , 2011 .

[29]  T. Veblen.  The Theory of the Leisure Class , 1901 .

[30]  Khai N. Truong,et al.  Breaking the disposable technology paradigm: opportunities for sustainable interaction design for mobile phones , 2008, CHI.

[31]  Thomas Frank,et al.  The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism , 1997 .

[32]  Eric Paulos,et al.  Second-hand interactions: investigating reacquisition and dispossession practices around domestic objects , 2011, CHI.

[33]  James E. Katz,et al.  Mobile phones as fashion statements: evidence from student surveys in the US and Japan , 2006, New Media Soc..

[34]  Matthew B. Miles,et al.  Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook , 1994 .

[35]  M. Barnard.  Fashion as Communication , 1996 .

[36]  Eli Blevis,et al.  Understanding why we preserve some things and discard others in the context of interaction design , 2009, CHI.

[37]  Tuan Q. Tran,et al.  Attractive phones don't have to work better: independent effects of attractiveness, effectiveness, and efficiency on perceived usability , 2010, CHI.

[38]  K. J. Bindas,et al.  Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity , 1990 .

[39]  Andreas Reckwitz.  Toward a Theory of Social Practices , 2002 .

[40]  Sabine Seymour,et al.  Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science and Technology , 2008 .

[41]  Eli Blevis,et al.  Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse , 2007, CHI.

[42]  Christopher K. Riesbeck,et al.  Inside Case-Based Reasoning , 1989 .

[43]  A. Michael Huberman,et al.  An expanded sourcebook qualitative data analysis , 1994 .

[44]  P. Burke.  Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste , 1989 .

[45]  Johan Redström,et al.  From use to presence: on the expressions and aesthetics of everyday computational things , 2002, TCHI.

[46]  Tawanna Dillahunt,et al.  In the dark, out in the cold , 2011, XRDS.

[47]  Claudia Eckert,et al.  Developing Considerate Design: Meeting Individual Fashion and Clothing Needs Within a Framework of Sustainability , 2009 .

[48]  W. Benjamin,et al.  The Arcades Project , 1999 .

[49]  M. Douglas,et al.  Pour une anthropologie de la consommation : le monde des biens; The world of goods : towards an anthropology of consumption , 2008 .

[50]  Jeffrey Bardzell,et al.  Virtual fashion and avatar design: a survey of consumers and designers , 2010, NordiCHI.

[51]  Bradley Quinn.  Textile Futures: Fashion, Design and Technology , 2010 .

[52]  A. Ahuvia,et al.  Beyond the Extended Self: Loved Objects and Consumers' Identity Narratives , 2005 .

[53]  Grant Mccracken,et al.  New approaches to the symbolic character of consumer goods and activities , 1989 .

[54]  Nikhil Sharma,et al.  Finding the lost treasure: understanding reuse of used computing devices , 2010, CHI.

[55]  E. Stolterman,et al.  Ensoulment and Sustainable Interaction Design , 2007 .