TCC Seminar: Innovative methods for designing circular consumer experiences

The CX strand seeks to strengthen the link between material resource flows and wellbeing. It will realise this new coupling through the design of new consumer experiences that will engage people in interactive, meaningful, co-creative and sustainable product cultures. Transformative product cultures designed to enable people to become ‘active co-creators’ in a sustainable product cycle. Engaging with ideas and methods from a range of disciplines including design, social research, psychology, computer science and Human-Computer Interaction is, we argue, essential to this transformation. This interdisciplinary approach enables us to capture how consumers make and interpret meaning and to actively promote engagement with consumers’ psychological, physical, social and, sensorial aspects of their well-being. This holistic understanding will inform the design of immersive technological environments to support CX in the textile circular economy. The seminar presents the prototype CX scenario building toolkit, a method we are using to explore new consumer experience design. Card resources are a popular research and design tool. They provide structure, facilitate engagement with users/practitioners, and generate inspiration and creative directions for practitioners. In the field of fashion design and sustainability, however, such tools are still relatively new and under-developed. We give a brief background to this innovative and co-creative design approach, discuss our use of card-based tools in our previous research, and outline the development and use of the CX scenario toolkit as a promising approach for research on Consumer Experience within the Textiles Circularity Centre. 

The third session in the TCC Seminar Series will be led by Dr Bruna Petreca, Royal College of Art and Professor Carey Jewitt, UCL.

The Textiles Circularity Centre presents its events programme of seminars, open labs and research in progress events which invite audiences to explore a vision of a future circular textiles economy for the UK SME apparel-fashion industry based on producing high value textiles from bio waste resource flow. The Seminar Series launched on 27 October 2021 as part of the Textiles Circularity Centre’s programme of events running from October 2021 to the end of 2024. Events are open to all and free to attend.