Material-Driven Design for Apparel and Textile Products

The purpose of this paper is 1) to demonstrate how knowledge transfer between academia and industry takes place in a collaborative and workshop-based process and 2) to discuss how that process contributes to industrial operationalization of research-based knowledge. This research is conducted within Project Y (2023-2026), which focuses on development and testing of recycled textiles made of feedstock from post-consumer textile waste. This paper is centred on the development of a material-driven design model for clothing and textiles. In Project Y 13 partners from academia and industry within textile recycling, weaving and knitting manufacturing as well as fashion, workwear and interior design experiment with material driven design to investigate, evaluate and eventually put recycled materials into use. In the period October 2023 to October 2024, six workshops were executed. Each workshop led to a new variation of the material driven design model, aiming to develop a material-driven design process that is operational in the industrial processes of apparel and textiles. The workshops were all based on co-creation between academic and industrial partners, all representing a variety of different fields within their professions. We finalize the paper discussing the benefits of co-creation between academia and industry and how it leads to mutual understanding and open spaces of opportunity.