Fashion Design students create a Sustainable Design Collection for Healthy Communities

Assistant Professor Barbara Trippeer’s recent Fashion Design Studio course, ADES 4590, assisted fashion design students in developing additional competence in design research — with a sustainability focus. The course was part of a collaboration with faculty from the programs of Interior Design, Fashion Design and User-Experience Design, funded as part of a grant by Cotton Incorporated.

The project the fashion design students participated in, titled "The Swap," involved collecting community information, outreach, and learning sustainable development methodologies.

The course included time to

• explore sustainability and its relationship to healthy communities, 
• create by applying their key learnings into team-led prototypes and 
• disseminate their findings through visual representations common to industry practices in the design field.

The class heard from guest speakers about research methods and sustainable methods and approaches. Students also focused on community mapping, color theory, field observations in the Denton area, and teamwork and they participated in an arts-based workshop at the Greater Denton Arts Council.

Through these experiences, the students were trained in the use of ethnographic methods to assist them as they created personas and user-journeys based on their community research.

As a result of their efforts, the fashion design students generated a series of garments, which incorporated sustainable development methodologies with natural fibers, natural dyes, and upcycling to produce a capsule collection intended for exhibition with the public as part of their outreach campaign to raise awareness of the importance of recycling.