http://www.huaracheblog.tumblr.com with over 1000 photos of Fascinating Mexican Huarache Footwear.
Environmental Intelligence
A Mix of ideas from the Web.
Create New Incentives, New Ways to Design and Better Ways to Live.
“all profits are not created equal. Those that carry a social benefit are better.” How can your work and your personal skills create more social benefit?
Can a disposable fashion garment, or footwear material made from mushrooms/mycelium have a second life as an organic nutrient?
Research Mycelium, its fascinating!
Five years ago I also wrote about BioCouture and clothes made with kombucha.
https://74fdc.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/biocouture-grow-your-own-clothes/
…yes, microfiber from the clothes we wear is a significant contaminant..It seems now that recycling plastic after its end life can only be part of the solution, because enough plastic particles also fall off during the life of an object.
A few years ago I introduced the environmental threat of man made synthetic dust as a contaminant.
https://74fdc.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/man-made-dust-as-a-contaminant/
But it just occurred to me that textiles also shed tiny fibers like dust, so the impact of synthetic particles to the natural environment will go way beyond the dust created by car tyres.
So what can be done? If only I knew! There are front end and back end solutions. Change the make-up of material, or develop ways to contain the dust particles it becomes.
When possible, I lean toward front end proactive solutions. Imagine if garment materials could be organic with a second life as nutrients to the soil we farm on, or the wildlife that eats/absorbs it. Imagine taking your old clothes to a feedlot to be processed into protein supplements for cows?
If it must leak into the natural environment, why can’t we make pollution a nutrient?
“waste does not exist, only wasted resources.” – Nancy Judd
How about biomaterials as nutrients!
The Paradox of Creativity – To be more creative you must also be more destructive.
Although most people are uncomfortable with breaking, or dismantling things; to create and to build something new, first you must break down something old.
Progress happens only when conventional parameters are changed. Be brave, but not reckless.
Enjoy paradoxes!
“Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it”.
Danny Kaye
Facebook, Instagram, Fashion, Tattoos, Living Rooms, Office Spaces and even the human body all have one thing in common; they can function as a canvas for people to express their individuality.
This blog for example is my canvas; my tattoo, fashion and interior decorating equivalent. On a side note, I wonder if blog discrimination also exists as it does for people with colourful tattoos, or unusual fashion sense and personal expression?
I would say that the most successful consumer products are so, not just for their technical function, but because they fulfill the need that people have to express/paint themselves? You could call this style; so how can we create new ways to express style and how can style be more than a surface expression?
Commercially the canvas analogy can probably be interpreted in the following way:-
- Product, Fashion, Footwear and/or Tattoo creatives; create designs, clothes, shoes, or art for people to use on their personal canvas, i.e. their personal space and their body.
- Retailers distribute and sell those objects of expression.
- While the most successful brands go so far as to create a new canvas for people to express themselves with! Creating new markets like Social Media, or genres like athletic clothing.
- And the top companies can offer all 3; Design, Distribution and Canvas/Platform/Genre.
After the discoveries of body art, fashion and most recently social media, what new canvas for personal expression is waiting to be created? And what products of personal expression are still missing from existing canvases?
How can we be more creative designers and provide higher levels of innovation to the most disruptive emergentive originality?
As fashion designers is our inspiration too linear? Are we too limited by following market trends and creating new twists on passed fashions, when we could be searching for other ways for people to express themselves?
Is it time to re-design Design?
Has the standard design approach of re-mixing old, or existing aesthetic trends, now become more traditional/conservative than progressive? Should so many designs (including mine) still be inspired by the existing aesthetic constructs, features of sport cars, or modernist sculpture?
Can we think more abstractly, identify and propose what doesn’t yet exist (new markets and genres), as well as creating more abstract design evolutions?
Developing a new creative process, disruptive like social media, for new product and new canvases? No, not the fashion equivalent of Airspace internet inspired interior design.
Think Meta, or Generative Design used to inform new designs, and extending to customization by consumers through a digital interfaces, a sort of Design by Dial front-end addition to the creative process (a 3D evolution of ID and MIADIDAS).
Or what if your clothes or shoes designs were be inspired by social media, and maybe they could also receive likes on a special social media application?! Imagine a wearable Instagram?
Its a stretch, huge challenge and financial risk to offer more abstract design solutions that consumers may not understand, but I think if we can find new ways for people to fill their canvas of personal expression, maybe its not such a risk and can be hugely rewarding.
I had already seen Moroccan babouches made from Raffia before. But to see brogues made from Raffia just blows me away!
Since I have spent many years researching woven shoes in Mexico, specifically Huaraches (Huarache Blog and Huarache Blog on Tumblr), I know how long it takes to make a woven shoe and how difficult it is.
These shoes are amazing!
Visvim Patrician Raffia Folk Indigo
Paul Smith Brogues Raffia
Robert Clergerie Pinto Black Natural
Jamingo Essaouira (JE)
I wish Jolanda from Jamingo Essaouira (JE) so much good luck with her brand and social initiative!
Check out her project HERE and HERE
Russia has a long history of creating and using art for social progress. My personal favorite are the Peredvizhniki (the wanderers) who broke away from the restrictive and formal artistic framework of the late 1800’s to portray a more humanistic, realistic and natural expression of life.
But with regards to Design, no artistic movement has had more influence than Russian constructivism, both functionally and aesthetically; from Bauhaus to De Stijl.
Functionally because art became considered a practice for social purposes, that art should attribute a social and moral responsibility and the belief that artists could be an agents for change by creating socially engaging works.
Aesthetically because Constructivism art was intentionally visually striking to captivate attention.
The same philosophy which would later also be applied to all Russian Design, from Architecture to Fashion and is still relevant today.
Admittedly Constructivism art was sometimes nothing more than propaganda rhetoric, however the Russian government soon this stopped this emancipating and ambitious abstract art movement, stating that it was not representational enough.
By Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko
By El Lissitzky
By Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanova
By Anton Lavinskii
By Dolgorukov Nikolai Andreevich
By Nikolai Prusakov
By Semen Semenov
74 FOOTWEAR DESIGN CONSULTING 