“Education before execution”

Like Caitlyn, I was drawn to the topic of Education and Information out of all the options under our over-arching theme of "Future Ways of Living." Last semester I was enrolled in a course at NSCAD called Prototyping for Fashion. This class was really enjoyable for me and I was really disappointed that it was unlikely that I would be able to take anymore fashion-driven courses in the time I have left at NSCAD. When I was think-tanking what my degree project could focus on, I thought something fashion related would be perfect—it's the perfect opportunity to use fashion in my education again, merge fashion and design, and produce a degree project that I'm actually passionate about. And so I landed on the topic of sustainable fashion. I talked with Caitlyn and we thought it would be a good idea to group together and design a sustainable fashion practices education service.

Still deep in the research phase, Caitlyn and I attended a NSCAD alumni talk on January 24th with NSCAD Textiles instructor Jennifer Green and Carley Mullally.

The talk provided lots of insights to begin carving out our concept. Jennifer stressed the relevance of sustainability in the fashion industry today, the importance of where and how we source our textiles, what happens to them when we dispose of them, the connection between culture and local textile production, and the room for education on the subject.

At this point, Caitlyn had already conducted some interviews and we put out a Google Forms survey in order to get some direct responses on some questions we had for the public regarding sustainable fashion. The survey provided some interesting written responses as well as some statistical data:

Once we collected some key insights and research, I was able to write our research response to begin proposing our degree project idea:

It was exciting to start carving out our ideas in written form and explain the importance of certain insights—I think this will be an interesting project that could prove very useful. I'm also excited to work with Caitlyn! :)