(ESMOD semester)
Group Project
Year: 2018
Upcycling pre-consumer waste collaboration with Spoonflower
Spoonflower
Spoonflower
Design brief: Spoonflower is a digital print supplier of fabric, gift-wrap and wallpaper, designed by and available to anyone. They opened their first European manufacturing facility in Berlin in April of 2016 and seek solution to their manufactured textile waste within Europe. The brief was to design a capsule series with two types of pre-consumer waste – blank stock material (roll-ends) and “unusable” printed material, where the prints can no longer been recognizable in the end and present an innovative scalable strategy for Spoonflower about their textile wastage utilization. Students worked on individual design concepts within a group’s common vision.
Group concept: The Spoonflower Green Box is a simple yet effective fabric library and knowledge facilitator. It is an inviting space located in this case, ESMOD Berlin as a trial run with the typical Spoonflower flair. This cozy pop-up space offers students a place to, on the one hand, learn about sustainability in fashion and textiles, but also to just come by and gather inspiration for future project as each individual has to include a new swatch to the library of their results.
The Box is to initially be set up by Spoonflower but will be organised and updated in the future by students of the participating universities. Each participating university class will elect one brand ambassador who will help with organisation and communication. Occasionally there could be one guest speaker from the textile sector to come in and discuss new innovations and trending subjects, all under a collaborative sponsorship between ESMOD and Spoonflower.
Individual idea: As part of the textile course workshops each group member showcased an example of how Spoonflower’s materials could benefit certain areas like textile surface design, dyeing, appliqué, and manipulation. I was responsible for the appliqué course, which provides practical skills on mastering several appliqué techniques. It is a contemporary approach towards appliqué as it challenges the creativity of the individual by having to distort the original prints and teaches zero waste designing by cross-disciplinary course collaborations with residues of screen printing, dyeing and fabric manipulation courses.
Exhibition
ESMOD- Semester project exhibition in Berlin
Project Partner
Team Members
Katie Chappuis
Ronja Fell
Philippa Walter