Katherine West - Portfolio 

The Toolkit had been developed in recent years by Angharad McLaren and members of the Clothing Sustainability Research Group. It includes 12 'approaches' and 'strategies' for improving longevity, for users to learn about and to understand the issues involved, through the reading of information and case studies or engaging with a 'tool'. It then gives opportunity to acknowledge what an organisation/brand is already doing in terms of durability and achieving clothing longevity. Followed by the opportunity to set down what more they could do in the future to make further improvements and how. This thought process is prompted by a series of questions (different for each 'approach'), which give some ideas for what strategies and action could be explored and taken. Some of the approaches focus on how design and testing strategies and practices can be changed or developed, to bring about improvement in the longevity of garments. Other approaches encourage the user to explore different business models, how to offer services to their consumers such as hiring, leasing, alterations and repair and how to develop effective sustainability communication campaign or engage with current campaigns and initiatives.

 

I worked with members of the team to plan and develop the trial workshops (which were bespoke for each retailer), and their accompanying presentations and feedback sheets. I then assisted in the delivery of facilitated workshop sessions with the retailers. The aim was to effectively trial and gain feedback on the toolkit. For each of the workshops I gathered, recorded and documented the data and synthesised all feedback given on the introduction and 12 approaches of the toolkit, the workshop and the toolkit's potential for use in their organisation. I then analysed and interpreted this data and generated ideas on how best to amend and improve the toolkit. These were communicated to the team and with approval, I worked to make the amends and updates. I also prepared a short report for each retailer, which gave a summary of all the ideas and future clothing  sustainability plans generated in their workshop.

 

Clothing Sustainability Research:

 

When the RA role ended in December 2018, I progressed to the position of part-time Research Fellow in Sustainable Clothing, where my principle role was to encourage, support and manage the development of research outputs in Sustainable Clothing, from the existing and new members of the Clothing Sustainability Research Group. The research group is made up of teaching, technical and research staff and postgraduate design students. Work was done to encourage the preparation of research papers for academic journals and conferences and the under taking of new clothing sustainability research. I kept the team up to date with details of relevant conference and journal calls and opportunities to attend symposiums, conferences and exhibitions. I also arranged Clothing Sustainability research seminars & presentations for the group, held with visiting academics and practitioners.

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In the first months of the role I made further developments to the 'industry' toolkit content and layout and prepared a final draft to be shared with Defra. I also contributed to and managed the development of the 'educational' version of the online toolkit and accompanying guidelines. Following planning meetings, I supported Knitwear, Fashion Technology and Fashion, Marketing, Management and Communication teaching staff to develop trial workshops (with accompanying presentations) for undergraduate students (at different stages of their course). The aim of this research and trialling was to find how to best support students to learn and become accustomed to considering these issues at the design stage, with the aim of leading to more informed designers going out to work in the industry. Exploration of how to make an interdisciplinary version of the toolkit and/or a workshop was also begun, to allow improvements across all art, design and creative disciplines.

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Later in 2018, I worked on 3 projects under the Sustainable Futures research theme. The first was to support on a multidisciplinary research project that had looked at identifying the challenges and success factors to enable the scaling up of upcycling SMEs based in the UK, from the perspectives of upcycling material suppliers, designers and makers and retailers of upcycled products. I supported the organisation, delivery and facilitation of a group workshop, which had a mixed group of upcycling practitioners and academics as the participants. During the workshop, participants were able to learn about and discuss stakeholder interview results, validate or add to the causal loop diagram that had been developed from these results; and suggest recommendations for businesses, government and other actors on how to bring about improvements, change and the scaling up of upcycling SMEs.

 

The second project explored the motivations behind and practices of, clothing, fashion and contour fashion upcycling clothing designer & makers (or those who took other related sustainable design approaches such as re-making, re-working, re-styling or creative repair). Myself and a researcher from Nottingham Business School arranged and carried out the interviews. Interview participants ranged from sole traders or small businesses to organisations carrying out upcycling practices at large scale.  The final role was to support on the development a funding bid for a major interdisciplinary project, 'Advances in Public Understanding in Sustainable Clothing' that would explore current consumer understanding of sustainable clothing and key current sustainability issues. Topics such as microfibre shedding from synthetic clothing, perceptions of sustainable craft practices, mass customisation and personalisation of clothing and the Fashion and Textiles industry transitioning to a circular economy were identified. The project would aim to explore if and how public understanding has changed since the research study and report carried out for Defra (published in 2008), 'Public Understanding of Sustainable Clothing'.

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