Going Circular Going Cellulose
The Going Circular Going Cellulose research project, initiated by ArtEZ Centre of Expertise Future Makers, is a collaboration between researchers, designers and companies to achieve a more sustainable and circular fashion and textile sector. This research project is conducted by the Fashion Professorship en the Professorship Tactical Design
This ambition calls for collaboration between people, institutions and companies that each have their own 'community of practice', speak their own language, and know their own assumptions, customs and rules. Yet everyone must be attuned to that common goal. This requires close cooperation, let's say intimately, in a broad sense.
- Intimate in the sense that people have to trust each other in sharing knowledge, experience and ambitions;
- Intimate in the sense that one must be able to follow the process of idea development, experiments, testing, etc. 'closely together' in order to understand what one is doing.
A sustainable fashion and textile sector also questions the relationship between clothing / textile and its use in relation to our physical actions. This, too, is another form of intimacy. Are we able to build such an intimate relationship with textiles / clothing that objects are no longer "consumer products" in a throwaway culture, but cherished and long-lasting human-object relationships?
In addition, Going Circular Going Cellulose investigates the changing role of the designer with regard to material development in collaboration with all partners in the chain, creating a different form of "material intimacy" between designer and object. As a designer, it is all about being close to the material, designing a material yourself and thinking from the perspective of the different possibilities of the material (instead of turning it into a beautiful end product).
The different designers in the project provide different visions and possible answers to this in their design research. The design projects will be presented as different examples of "material intimacy".