We now have a new blog!

Dear TED blog followers! We now have a new blog! Please look for new posts on our new blog, and please follow us on our new website as well. You can sign up with TED on our homepage in the top right corner.

The TED blog has got a new home.

Please go to www.tedresearch.net to see the new website and latest news.

TED's TEN at Fashion Colloquia

Becky Earley was at the Fashion Colloquia at LCF this morning presenting TED's TEN to an audience of students, designers and journalists.

The Colloquia is an event organised by four institutions including Parson NY, LCF and The Domus Academy, Italy to explore the fundamental issues around fashion as all the international fashion weeks take place this month.

Becky finished her presentation by asking the audience to contribute to a questionnaire being developed as part of the MISTRA Future Fashion project by the Copenhagen Business School - What questions would you like to ask fashion designers about sustainability? Do you want to know how other designers think about sustainability?

If you would like to contribute email us at ted@chelsea.arts.ac.uk and your contribution may become part of this exciting research project.

Chelsea graduates in best of UAL design show

Kay Politowicz and Judy Lindsay (CSM) have been working with fashion designer Giles Deacon on the selection of the best design graduates from the UAL this year, that will be showcased in British-ish, at the V& A for London Design Festival.

The show will include Chelsea BA textile graduate Haruka Miyamoto, who produces beautiful installations made from old plastic bags and food packaging, that are twisted into tiny threads, using an ancient Japanese craft technique. A podcast of Haruka in conversation with Becky Earley is here .

Another graduate on show is Chelsea graphic designer Joshua Osborne who has made a short film that explores the traditional world of English men's tailoring.

The show is on from 17th - 25th September.

Top image: Joshua Osborne
Bottom image: Haruka Miyamoto

New website coming soon

We are hard at work on getting the new TED website up and running. It is only a few weeks away now but here is a sneak peak of our new look!

There will be all the latest news and updates on our activities and a great archive section of TED projects going back to 1996, all beautifully shown with images and our writing. Our resource section will include our well developed Resource Sheets and a whole new area dedicated to TED's TEN, our set of design strategies for fashion/textile designers, which we are now helping several large fashion brands to use as starting points for sustainable innovation, within Sweden and the US.

Fashion theory for dummies

Although TED has been lucky enough to secure funding for the next four years as part of the MISTRA Future Fashion project, we missed out on an opportunity to collaborate with the great Otto von Busch, a fashion hacktivist and researcher based in Sweden, who unfortunately will not be part of our project. However, news has just come in that Otto has now been offered the post of Associate Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons New School of Design in New York, which is great news for everyone at Parsons. We hope there will be an opportunity for us to work with Otto soon.

In the meantime, Otto has just sent us copies of a small series of booklets on fashion theory he has produced, using simple illustrations and stories to make fashion theory accessible for students and dummies.

As the blurb for the Virus of Fashion booklet says: "How come fashion has such influence on us? In this short story we will follow the virus of fashion and see how it infects us with desire."

Download the booklets here

Sustainable Textiles short course at Chelsea

Clara Vuletich has designed a new short course at Chelsea called Sustainable Textiles, that runs over four days in October and February 2012. The course will consist of morning seminars on all the key sustainable textile design ideas followed by afternoon sessions of low impact printing and dyeing in the print room at Chelsea. This is a great chance to make some of our research available to a wider audience and the content of the course comes from Clara's experience delivering TED's Interconnected Design Thinking Workshops and her workshops with textile collective bricolage.

This is a great opportunity if you are a fashion/textile designer or craft maker wanting to find out the latest ideas and extend your own practice.

More information and to book here.