For this week of our project, we split interviews up between the two of us and started early, reaching out to as many people as possible and asking them various questions about sustainable fashion. As Katherine mentioned, we also created a general survey on google and posted it online to reach as many people as possible. To learn more about the survey read Katherine's blog "Education before Execution" here
Process Work
We finished the first stage of the research for this project by creating our case analysis, infographic, and conclusion statement. Collaborating together on creating this document was fun and enjoyable, which makes me excited to go further with this project with Katherine!
If you are interested in reading our full document, you can download it here:
Out of the entire document, creating the initial persona was the most fun to create. Of course, this is just one of
many personas we could choose to have as our target audience, but it gives us a good starting point to look back on for what values we could focus on when starting to plan out what would be included in this program we want to create.
I think personas and empathy maps can give us a good description of pain points to look out for when designing for an audience, and I plan to start an empathy map shortly as well.
Key Insights
Our continuous approach to interviews allowed us to reach a lot of different people and with that came a lot of key insights. Just this Friday, February 3rd, 2023, I reached out to my old high school art teacher (Alison West) and was told a lot of helpful information on how to teach a class, running an art room day-to-day, if a resource like what we want to make would work or not, and more!
For me, this interview was one of the most helpful because Alison has had direct experience with teaching high school art and textiles class for many years and knows the insides and outs of the programs. Plus as a bonus, I got to visit her as a friend/colleague now rather than as a student. ❤️ I included a little photo from inside her room, it was my favorite spot to be in when I was in high school.
Reading of the Week
A very thorough reading I came across this week is "Global Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion" which can be read here. I believe you need a school login to access it. They have an entire chapter dedicated to North American consumer habits around fashion and is fascinating to dive into. The chapter validates our concerns about lack of education, literally starting out the chapter saying,
"Probably the most important deterrent to user engagement is lack of information. Although academics and industry have been discussing sustainability for over two decades, consumers are just realizing that textile product waste is a problem."
They continue to say we have to change the behavior of consumers with the use of information so that they know about the large effects clothing waste has on the environment. I think the chapter summarized a lot of important points that we were starting to investigate. For example, another great point that was mentioned was accessibility, something I think gets overlooked. Not only the way the information is accessed, but also if it is affordable. We wanted to provide this service as an "open source" resource that could be taught long after we graduate, not something hidden behind a paywall.
This article was another insightful piece of our research that added further validity to our project direction.
Next Steps...
For me, I will start combining our interviews into a document and try to lay out the interview results in a creative and interesting way. I will also start brainstorming on what we could include based on the interviews we have continued to make headway at!
This blog entry was written by Caitlyn Gass, co-founder, and multi-disciplinary designer on this project. To learn more about Caitlyn, visit the about page.
Last update: 2.01.2023
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