Greetings from Kolding!

Day 1 - getting acquainted.

This is the first day of a great design adventure!
This morning the foreign students were escorted to the school early in the morning. Everybody was still a bit uneasy because of all the strange new faces, but once we sat down for some breakfast at the school, the conversation picked up. And especially once everybody had shown their photo's from 1998 and had their little introduction, we got a lot more comfortable with each other and we could really start on the first explorations of our design theme: fashion rethink!

The first exercise was to try and name the different themes in fashion between 1998 and 2020. Our Olli was appointed journalist by the three girls (no he didn't have much say in it himself) - he does a good job so far, so well done girls!

First brainstorm

We initially looked into individualism due to hearing about this from almost everyone's memories of 1998 as well as how we use clothing to fits in with our peers. We also discussed different generations and how they in the past have developed their own styles, not only of clothing but of consumption. We particullary liked the idea of the needs of clothing, for example to fit in or express yourself aside from the practical issues. Also a strong idea was the value of clothing, for example in the UK tshirts can be brought from as little as 50p and jeans 3 pounds in supermarkets. Eventually we thought about how the lack of emotional or personal value people give to their clothing partly causes the throw-away culture in fashion.

Theme focus

The second time we brainstormed about our themes, we focused especially on a 'needs vs values' kind of theme. Eventually we formed three main questions about durability in clothing:

1 - can you achieve social responsibility through emotional or personal value (in clothing)?
2 - how can you create a 'trend that goes beyond trends'? Normal trends come and go, and that is obviously not the way to achieve sustainability
3 - shopping for clothes often gives that 'instant gratification' it feels good and that can be part of the problem. How can we create durability that feels good?

We also talked about how we could fit these questions in a timeframe of 2020, and soon we got a bit carried away talking about all sorts of new technologies in clothing that might be possible then, so maybe that can be a good starting point as well? We haven't figured that out quite yet...

Group members
Furthermore, we had a little talk about ourselves, what we think are our strenghts, weaknesses etc. We concluded that we have quite a nice mix altogether here! So, to be continued.. :-)