Speculative Design Project - Parsons School of Design
Presented: 02.05.2021
How might future look where fashion goes extremely digital?
* Project: Parsons School of Design, Futures Studies & Speculative Design
* Question: How might a future look where fashion goes extremely digital?
* Methodology: Used speculative design methodologies (below in design process) to envision future scenarios facing fashion industry for the year 2036. Selected a ‘desired future scenario’ and introduced artifacts to start building dialogues around.
Step 1: Research & Future Methods (Speculation)
I’ve used multiple methodologies to expand on possible futures scenarios prior to producing futures artifacts. My research process started with analyzing signals spanning across interesting Social/Technological/Economical/Environmental/Political news or articles. Gathering a diverse set of signals and organizing them into meaningful trends, help further inspire following methods (and ultimately come up with futures scenarios).
Kerspern’s Blueprint would helped me further amplify these signals under given abundance/scarcity contexts on resources, and how fashion products/users would behave in such scenarios. The process was refined with organizing them into Dator’s four arcs. This would mean I now have 4 distinct possible futures with different speculations on how fashion industry has become.
Methodology 1: Signal Scanning
Methodology 2: Kerspern’s Blueprint for Economic Design Fiction (Speculative Context x Product Canvas)
Methodology 3: Dator’s Four Arcs
Step 2: Future Narrative
In order to come up with a detailed scenario with artefacts (glimpses), I structured the Dator’s Four Arcs into a meaningful story. On the contrary to traditional approach (to pick one) this allowed me to envision that all of these stories could come together to complete one another. I’ve plotted my horizon in the collapse scenario (2036) and started going into some artefacts to generate further imagination of this time.
Collapse Scenario Narrative:
‘‘A further decline in resources and threats on the environment started putting pressure on all aspects of the society as we know now. Governments failing to fulfill their climate crisis agenda, they turned into functions that organize companies - which are the main lead of the society now. Certain caps and sustainability indexes started a migration to 'immersive worlds' where business started operating in, leisure was facilitated and games were social activities now. Consumers relied on a ‘baseline wardrobe' with physical items just enough and standard, while digital clothing had a boom in creativity and breadth.’’
Step 3: Future Artifacts
Within the given context of Collapse Scenario - Hyperdigital Fashion context, I started exploring possible experiences. The purpose was to bring the rather abstract futures context into a level where audience can start challenging the concept and share their opinion, to further refine the concept. The designs are kept in early stage on purpose.
One of the scenarios developed was an interactive prototype: Digital Only Clothing Scenario. Scenario involves society highly adopting immersive platforms and experiencing their identity through fashion items in these immersive experiences.
One of the ‘glimpses’ of the future was a voice recording of a call center-user dialogue. You can now speak to your ‘digital wardrobe’ as if its a call center, and request certain updates on your ‘digital only’ clothes for your games and immersive events. (audio is deducted for privacy reasons)
Another glimpse is ‘Augmented Fashion’ and the wide usage of digital twin clothing. Society is wearing plain green-screen clothes. The outfit is selected digitally by the person wearing them and this unique information captured on cloud, which helps others view them in the desired way.
A final glimpse was an in-home shopping experience. An augmented reality experience where single/multiple creators can discuss and create a digital fashion item - then put it on immersive social media - sell these items or get social feedback around it. It’s also a conversation starter in terms of how the future of social influencers might look like, and what they do on a day to day basis to generate/market content.
In summary:
Dreams can inspire us to image that things could be radically different than they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that imaginary world.
It’s hard to say what today’s dreams are; it seems they have been downgraded to hopes. Hope that we will not allow ourselves to become extinct, hope that we can feed the starving, hope that there will be room for us all on this tiny planet. There are no more visions. We don’t know how to fix the planet and ensure our survival. We are just hopeful.
Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby