Mending the future Wisdom, memory and emotional bonds with our clothes
- PhD student
-
Iryna Kucher
- Project period
- 2020 - 2021
- Defense date
- 08 Apr 2024
- Main supervisor
- Ulla Ræbild
- LAB
- Sustainability and Design
- LAB theme
- Everyday Life
- Assessment committee
- Professor Ingun Grimstad Klepp, Consumption Institute Norway, Oslo Metropolitan University, Associate Professor & Senior Researcher Olga Gurova, Laurea University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland, Associate Professor Vibeke Riisberg, Design School Kolding
About the project
In particular, it examines the understanding of aesthetic codes of mending; explores mending as private and collective practices, and will attempt to bridge the participants’ knowledge from different social settings to allow articulation of imaginaries across places, to open possibilities for shared worlding through co-exploration and participation, and to envision the futures of these practices.
Methods
This PhD project will be drawn upon the wardrobe and material methods which are material culture-oriented and have theoretically contributed to the understanding of fashion as a process, not a product, framing garments within peoples’ life through time.
It is conducted within the broad field of material culture moving across disciplinary boundaries of sociology, anthropology, history, and design.
Furthermore, it intends to go beyond the understanding of the existing practices and embraces a Research Through Design (RTD) methodology, where researchers are collaboratively, materially, and critically engaged with futures, understood as collaborative explorations of possibilities situated between the preferred futures and mundane, design and everyday life, past, and future.
Expected results
The project aims to contribute, both academically and practically, to the study of slow rhythms of consumption, and the understanding of the meaning of mending practices and their aesthetics in contemporary Western and Eastern societies. Moreover, it aims to envision an alternative present and future of fashion by using design to re-introduce mending as a practice of care and finding deep joy in already existing clothing.
It intends to co-design a pre-defined set of aesthetic parameters of the most versatile mending techniques by using redesigned mending tools and to explore how design can facilitate scales of engagement with mending practices on a domestic level.
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