Prospect, seed and activate: advancing design for sustainability in fashion

The ‘made world’ is a consequence – an emergent space in which the human species has progressively found ways to modify and enhance the world around us. The urban spaces we roam, buildings we inhabit, products we use and garments we wear, collectively represent our intellectual capacity to imagine a better world that is beyond our current level of experience. Yet, in so doing, we are inadvertently undermining our chances of survival. Indeed, the ecological design drive is currently recalibrating the environmental credentials of the ‘made world’, in many cases, through the generation of more ‘stuff’, albeit greener stuff. This chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the fashion and sustainability area of study that both recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability and offers strong visions for how we might recalibrate the parameters of good design, in an unsustainable age; offering a broad and critical perspective of design and sustainability, that draws out strategies and approaches for design at both product and systems levels, and also examines the future potential roles for the designer that sustainability necessitates and inspires.