Abstract
Digitising design processes incrementally reduce the degree to which designers bodily engage with materials to design garments. While extended reality technology such as augmented and virtual reality could address the lack of bodily involvement in digital design processes, they have yet to resonate with fashion designers in academia and the industry to be fully included. The presented research aimed to explore extended reality technology as an enabler of ‘interspaces’ that mediates bodily experiences and interactions of engaging with digital material based on spatial and technological affordances. The emergent design spaces allowed for varying degrees of bodily engaging digital materials. Reflections made on workshop-based design activities with extended reality technology suggested that hybrid design spaces allowed for translating craft-based design activities commonly reliant on intricate human body movements, such as knitting and draping, into digital ones. They further suggested that bodily engaging with digital content in an immersive manner can lead to higher degrees of considering wearability and interaction-based body-dress relations during design processes. The findings of this research can contribute to the discourse on digitising design practices within fashion as they open the space for thoughts about what may get lost when solely engaging in digital design processes that are streamlined for specific ways of working. The suggested use of extended reality technology reintroduces messiness through bodily engagement that may contribute to engaging with digital technology in fashion design beyond factors like efficiency and productivity toward more diverse and versatile digital and hybrid-based design experiences.
Keywords
digital fashion, design spaces, digital material, body as material
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.507
Citation
Tepe, J.(2023) Shifting Spaces in Fashion: Approaching digitised design spaces from a bodily perspective, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.507
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Included in
Shifting Spaces in Fashion: Approaching digitised design spaces from a bodily perspective
Digitising design processes incrementally reduce the degree to which designers bodily engage with materials to design garments. While extended reality technology such as augmented and virtual reality could address the lack of bodily involvement in digital design processes, they have yet to resonate with fashion designers in academia and the industry to be fully included. The presented research aimed to explore extended reality technology as an enabler of ‘interspaces’ that mediates bodily experiences and interactions of engaging with digital material based on spatial and technological affordances. The emergent design spaces allowed for varying degrees of bodily engaging digital materials. Reflections made on workshop-based design activities with extended reality technology suggested that hybrid design spaces allowed for translating craft-based design activities commonly reliant on intricate human body movements, such as knitting and draping, into digital ones. They further suggested that bodily engaging with digital content in an immersive manner can lead to higher degrees of considering wearability and interaction-based body-dress relations during design processes. The findings of this research can contribute to the discourse on digitising design practices within fashion as they open the space for thoughts about what may get lost when solely engaging in digital design processes that are streamlined for specific ways of working. The suggested use of extended reality technology reintroduces messiness through bodily engagement that may contribute to engaging with digital technology in fashion design beyond factors like efficiency and productivity toward more diverse and versatile digital and hybrid-based design experiences.