Remake: Design Foundations
Anna Lidström
2020 (English) Licentiate thesis, monograph (Other academic) [Artistic work]
Leftovers, waste, and surplus generated by increasing production and consumption of material goods. Their problem is not new, and over the last decade the search for a solution has given rise to various theories about and technologies for resource recovery and waste management. In the fashion and clothing industry, designers have explored ways to reuse and remanufacture production and consumption waste and surplus before recycling material components on a fiber level, thereby aiming to realize greater environmental savings. While several examples of design practices building on different forms of reuse and remanufacturing approaches exist, foundational theoretical methods for design remain poorly researched.
This thesis explores and analyzes the aesthetic potential in textile and clothing waste and surplus for new design expressions and functions. Fashion design students performed initial methodological explorations through practicing redesign to find central concepts in design thinking that present opportunities and challenges for remake methods. The exploration shows a challenge to go from thinking fashion design as a method of remembering, preserving and showing, to remake fashion design as a method of forgetting, destroying and searching. In this thesis one method has so far been developed. However, the findings point to several methodological challenges in selecting and reworking materials within the context of the remake. These methods need to be explored and developed further to strengthen remake models and practices, and the central characteristic of traditional fashion design thinking needs to be developed further for a fundamental shift in thinking towards remake and redesign fashion design.