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Inspired: Exploring creative pedagogies at the early stage of the fashion design process
Abstract
The article introduces the fashion process as a relevant topic for the current research in the field, stating the need for further explorations and academic investigation. Recent studies provide detailed guidelines about the fashion design process understood as a linear sequence of stages evolving from the initial sources of inspiration through fabrics research, sketching, pattern-making and garment construction techniques to end products and collection delivery. Very few studies investigate how, when or where innovative ideas emerge along this process. Although acknowledged as part of real-life practice, the intuitive/unstructured/experimental part of creation is hardly grasped within a linear framework. Besides the systematic approach to the design process, fashion students also need to learn how to think creatively and navigate successfully between the multiple phases of the development. How to experiment, reflect, adapt, solve problems, select, improve and enrich their processes. The studio exercises illustrated in the last part of this article propose an integration of design thinking methods into creative pedagogies for fashion design. Challenges, play and other experimental activities engage students better at the early stage of the process, feed their imagination and are instrumental in developing their personal creative approach to fashion.
The exploration of signature pedagogies in selected arts and design disciplines has identified distinctive traits and concepts that are important to professional education in each field. This chapter discusses nine salient themes that characterise these pedagogies: the artist’s voice, style and identity; interpersonal interaction and collaboration; reflection and reflexivity; technology-enhanced teaching and learning; linking, connecting and relating through synthesis and coherence; creativity; truthfulness, authenticity and trust; creative collaboration with other artists and designers; and the interplay between surface structure and deep structure. Based on these themes and the chapter topics, nine pedagogical issues are proposed for future exploration and development in the signature pedagogy framework. These are pedagogies of pioneers in the profession, generative apprenticeship, reflexivity, transition, artistic tradition and heritage, truth, evocative ambiguity, creative uncertainty and designerly formation. Collectively, these pedagogical issues inform three defining characteristics of signature pedagogies: first, what experts in the field do; second, how knowledge within the discipline is analysed, critiqued, accepted or refuted; and third, what constitutes the threshold concepts that shape the discipline.
The purpose of this study was to analyse the early phase of apparel design process and how professional designers develop their kernel idea by sketching and how visual sources stimulate their ideation. Three designers were asked to design a piece of outerwear while thinking aloud in an experimental design session. The data (i.e. verbal and video protocols as well as material written and drawn by the participants) was analysed with qualitative content analysis and by constructing idea development diagrams. The results indicated variations in the (1) use of photographs as sources of inspiration, (2) emphasis on simplification and association in interpretation and adaptation of these sources, and (3) designers’ primary generators. Our findings on how expert designers utilise visual material for example to adapt visual details into their ideas or to envision a suitable fabric could be used to give illustrative examples for students of apparel design.
Sources of inspiration play an important role in the design process, both in defining the context for new designs and in informing the creation of individual designs. Previous designs and other sources of ideas furnish a vocabulary both for thinking about new designs and for describing designs to others. In a study of knitwear design, a process in which the use of sources of inspiration is explicitly acknowledged, we have observed that designers communicate with each other about new designs, styles and moods, largely by reference to the sources of their ideas. In this paper we discuss why this style of communication is so important, and what information it is used to convey. We view it as the use of a language to describe regions in the space of possible designs
In an experimental study of designing by adaptation, professional and student knitwear designers were videotaped designing sweaters based on a Persian rug or a 19th century tapestry. The designers used a range of source-triggered and goal-directed adaptation strategies to create adaptations ranging from the closest possible translations into the medium to radical transformations of abstract characteristics. While each strategy sometimes led to each type of adaptation, the source-triggered strategies were predominant for the easy-to-adapt source (the rug) and typically led to close adaptations; while the goal-directed strategies were more common for the more difficult source (the tapestry), and more often led to more radical transformations of the source. The professional designers made more use of goal-directed strategies than the student designers. The study supports the view that creative behavior can usefully be described in terms of consistent patterns resulting from both task demands and from cognitive capacities and learned skills.
The purpose of this study is to examine the apparel design process by asking how a designer applies perceived information from visual sources and develops concepts through the exploration of design elements and principles. A stimuli-based design experiment was conducted with a professional designer as a pilot study. It was observed that preliminary visual units, termed small concepts, gradually evolve during the early design stage. Since this process is critical to continue the entire idea development, this paper focuses primarily on the detailed observation of the early design process, in which the designer perceives visual elements from a source-of-inspiration image, immediately transfers them to clothing design-related elements, explores variations in shape and placement by applying design principles, and finally develops small concepts. These small concepts become the basis for the later development of more complex design ideas. Understanding this design knowledge and relevant strategies will trigger creative idea generation and shed light on teaching the design process to apparel design students.
Purpose
To assess the creative role of sources of inspiration in visual clothing design. It aims to analyse simple, general accounts of observed design behaviour and early stages of the clothing design process, what is the nature of design inspiration, how sources of inspiration are gathered and how they affect the creativity and originality in clothing design.
Design/methodology/approach
A progressive series of empirical studies looking at ready‐to‐wear clothing design has been undertaken; in situ observation, semi‐structured interviews and constrained and semi‐constrained design tasks. This empirical approach used ethnographic observational methods, which is effective in situations where conventional knowledge acquisition methods are insufficient, when broad understanding of an industry is needed, as in the fashion industry, not just a case study of a single individual or company.
Findings
Identifies the major types of idea sources in clothing design and provides information about each source. Recognises that these sources of inspiration help designers to create design elements and principles of individual designs. In order to foster originality, sources of inspiration play a powerful role throughout the creative stage of design process, and also in the early stages of fashion research and strategic collection planning.
Originality/value
This paper highlights the role of sources of inspiration and its effect in creativity and originality in the clothing design process. Offers practical help to clothing designers and design‐led clothing companies.
The model of design taught in educational institutions in the United Kingdom and elsewhere has fundamental weaknesses. At best it is a partial and superficial description of what happens when individuals engage in the process of design. At worst it is inaccurate and misleading. The authors are working on multiple-perspective approaches to design education that emphasise the central importance of context to understanding design as human enterprise. In this paper, they introduce the idea of design as narrative. Like narratives, objects have power in social settings: they offer an interpretation of the story of their existence; they give back echoes of their past. To regard design objects as forms of text allows ‘readers’ to interpret them within their own frames of reference. The understanding that arises from this form of interpretation allows for creative involvement with objects and permits more realistic engagement with design work. It promotes a form of thinking that is personal, relevant and open to negotiated meaning in an otherwise increasingly prescriptive educational world.
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