Slow Summit lectures this Friday

The TFRC/Craftspace Slow Summit Open Lecture is this Friday and we are looking forward to seeing Alastair Fuad-Luke and Helen Carnac's presentations. There are still places available for the lectures which are taking place at 272 High Holborn, Friday 8th July at 10:30am.

The event is co-curated by Becky Earley and Helen Carnac, and examines the emergence of the Slow Movement, within a context of design, making and art practice. The two guest speakers will map out the ground that this new creative thinking occupies, both addressing the theory and the practice, as well as the local/global economics and politics that fuel the movement.

Slow Summit event

The fourth event in the 2011 TFRC Open Lecture series, run in conjunction with Craftspace, is the Slow Summit, on July 8th with Prof. Alastair Fuad-Luke and Prof. Helen Carnac.

The event is co-curated by Becky Earley and Helen Carnac, and is an Open Lecture followed by an invitation-only workshop session. The event examines the emergence of the Slow Movement, within a context of design, making and art practice. The two guest speakers will map out the ground that this new creative thinking occupies, both addressing the theory and the practice, as well as the local/global economics and politics that fuel the movement.

Prof. Alastair Fuad-Luke is a renowned sustainable design theorist and writer and author of Design Activism, the Eco Design Handbooks and newly appointed Professor at Aalto University, Helsinki.

Prof. Helen Carnac is a maker, writer and curator of Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution, an touring exhibition from Craftspace.

The Open Lectures will be at 272 High Holborn, Lecture Theater, 10:30am - 1pm.

Mike Press talk now available

Mike Press - Handmade Knowledge, March 25th 2011 from Textiles Environment Design on Vimeo

The recent lecture given by Mike Press that we hosted here as part of the TFRC Sustainable Textiles Seminars is now available as a Podcast, also available here.

We are also in the process of editing and preparing recordings from speakers who were part of our IMPACT series this year - this included the founders of AO Textiles, Amy Twigger Holroyd from Keep & Share and Cyndi Rhoades from Worn Again.

Mike Press to speak at Chelsea

We are very excited to announce that one of our design and craft thinking heroes Prof. Mike Press, is coming to speak at Chelsea College of Art & Design, as part of the TFRC Sustainable Textiles Research Seminar series. It will be an Open Lecture titled 'Hand-made Knowledge' on 25th March in the Lecture Theatre, 2 - 3pm.

Mike is Associate Dean of Design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and has written and researched widely on design, innovation, contemporary craft and the management of creativity.

He has authored three books, including The Design Agenda: a Guide to Successful Design Management and The Design Experience.

His research and writing spans three areas: design and crime, the future of craft, and co-design. He is also an experienced supervisor and examiner of PhDs in design, and has been an advocate of practice-based approaches to design research.

Most recently he has been involved in a scoping project to develop a design school in Rwanda.

Image left: Mike Press
Image right: Kntted Remotes, Hazel White

TFRC/VF Competition launches

The VF/TFRC Student Competition launch was a great success yesterday with over 120 students and tutors attending.

We heard from a wonderful range of speakers who all explored the latest innovations in textile and fashion design and research and for their last presentation slide they were all asked to reveal how they would spend the £250 if they won a mentoring prize.

Dr Emma Neuberg presented her reasons for setting up the Slow Textiles Group, a group of people who meet regularly to learn and exchange textile skills and knowledge . For her, 'slow' is about quality rather than time and Emma explained the many benefits of encouraging re-use and hand skills including an improvement in well-being and reduced stress. Emma said she would spend her £250 on generating good primary research to support the project proposal.

Alex Deschamps - Sonsino, an interaction designer, summarised the most interesting interaction projects around the theme of 'Responsible Living'. For students who are thinking of using new technologies in their proposals, Alex emphasised that they understand the technology properly and that the appropriate technology has been chosen for the right reasons. Alex would spend her £250 on a Arduino Lilypad, a microcontroller board designed for wearables and e-textiles.

Adam Thorpe from Vexed Generation and Design Against Crime used Mazlow's infamous 'Hierarchy of Needs' to structure his exploration of the theme 'protecting what I value', through some of the many varied projects he has worked on as a designer delivering garment and material innovations for urban environments. Adam would spend his £250 on a second hand bike from ebay as its the best way to get around town and is a primary research tool for garment design for urban mobility.

Di Mainstone is a fashion designer who designs 'artefacts' or garments for the body that are used in performance. Di explained her recent interest in exploring objects and garments that have a multifunctional or modular application and how her design processes were very often co-designed with collaborators from other disciplines.

Suzanne Lee was the final speaker, and she presented her BioCouture project, and outlined the current emerging field of researchers who are designing using living organisms. Suzanne would spend her £250 on making sure the project and the 'back story' was well communicated whether it is through good images, a website or a short film or animation, and emphasised that this was often the most overlooked area for textile and fashion designers.

The Application Form is now available on the TFRC Project blog, on the right hand column.

TFRC to launch UAL-wide student competition with VF Corp, USA, Monday 21st February 2011

TFRC have joined up with VF Corporation in the USA, the parent company to brands including Wrangler, Lee and Seven For All Mankind, to launch the Future Fashion Textiles Competition for all fashion and textile students and recent graduates of the UAL. The launch of the competition will be on Monday 21st February, (2 - 6pm, 272 High Holborn). The five themes will be contextualised and explored by a speaker for each theme. The themes are 'Simplicity Regained', 'Health & Wellness', 'Networked Lives', 'Responsible Lives' and 'Trust Rebalanced'. Speakers will be announced next week.

The overall winner will be announced in mid July given a cash prize of £1,500 and their work will be shown at the VF US Summit Exhibition in September. They will also be flown out to the event, to see the show and to network.The competition will run as an open call to all textile and fashion students at the University, and will also be open to recent graduates (last two years), with a deadline for entries in early July. However, working from this launch event, students and graduates will also have the opportunity to submit a short proposal in March. Ten of these proposals will then be chosen and those students will recieve a £250 budget and two mentoring sessions from TFRC members.

http://www.http//uk.7forallmankind.com/en_en/

http://www.nautica.com/home/index.jsp

These themes all have aspects of sustainability running through them and they also strongly relate to TFRC's own research themes of digital, science and sustainable textiles. With an impressive line-up of world-leading textile designers and researchers planned to speak, the event should be really insightful and worth attending, even if you are not going to enter the competition.

For more information on the launch event and to keep up to date as more speakers are announced, keep an eye on the TFRC blog.....

TFRC launches as University Research Centre

Textile Futures Research Centre (TFRC) has recently become one of the University's six Research Centres and it includes textile researchers from Chelsea/Camberwell/Wimbledon, London College of Fashion and Central St Martins.

Becky Earley is currently the Acting Director of TFRC and Becky has been busy planning some exciting new events and projects. The launch of the Centre's new status was last week where members met to start workshopping the Centre's new research themes. These themes are: Design/Science Textiles; Digital Textiles; Sustainable Textiles and the fourth theme Identity & Reflection. The new diagram shown above, is a visualisation of the themes and how they may overlap. While up to this point, most members have been involved in their own individual research, this new structure is encouraging new collaborative research that will exist at the intersection of some or all of these themes.

There is also a new blog called TFRC Connections, which explores and celebrates the connections between TFRC members work. Watch this space for more news about some of the new TFRC project's happening in the New Year.