amfi's design-driven fashion label

By kwaldbillig April 17th, 2013

D e s i g n _ p h a s e

Part one of the design phase

As our previous posts have mentioned, we’ve had a serious turn of events that is cause for concern. After pitching an ingenious idea, now we have to come up with the resources and the knowledge to make our dreams a reality.
Naturally, we need to be realistic and rational if we’re trying to transform ideas into innovations. This involves making an inventory and evaluating the technical possibilities and abilities within the group. But more importantly, the question for us: what possibilities are within the boundaries of our concept? With such an ill-defined question, we’re busy finding experts that can help us morph our possibilities into the creation of a physical design.

In other news, this week we also had a design presentation with all the other MediaLAB’bers. Because we structured the presentation as a brainstorming/co-creation session, we got some extremely helpful feedback from our colleagues.

By kwaldbillig March 28th, 2013

F i n a l i z a t i o n _ c o n c e p t s

Ending of the concept phase

Three bold titles with strong incentives for specific stakeholders. After more than eighty hours of sweat, tears, agreeing to disagree, and making changes – we’ve finally considered ourselves finished with the official Concept phase. Although we’re overjoyed to have come this far as a team, there’s a long road ahead of us. Naturally, however, we’d like to share our outcomes with our loyal blog following. What really made the presentation is that we reviewed the insights we gathered in the research phase that drove us to create these concepts. Each of them is indeed innovative in its own way – and in the words of Nietzsche: “the essence of all beautiful art, of all great art, is gratitude”.

“Creating a buzz on mainstream media by giving the fashion show audience a digital goodie bag with exclusive content”. This concept offers a “one-of-a-kind” social media feed overlaid on the desktop live stream, which is fed by ‘share’ function on individual pieces of static detail content being pushed to users at the live show through the AFW app. What makes this concept innovative is that instead of the social media feed be text-based, our feed would be one of multimedia where desktop users would be more enticed to click on and further interact with the images (thumbnails) bubbling up in the stream. The insight that drove this concept was that most every attendee has and is using their mobile phones during a catwalk show. Instead of having them being distracted all over the web, incentivize them to stay in sync with the brand’s exclusive content. The added benefit to this concept is that it offers traceability; the brand has the ability to pinpoint key influencers on social media and understand what social media channels matter for the brand.

“Telling the story of the brand through sound”. If you were to close your eyes at a fashion show, it would be hard to get a basic feeling of what the clothes are intended to make the seer wearer feel. With this concept, members of the catwalk audience would be able to create another layer of meaning for the visuals through carefully designed sound. Ideally this concept would also allow any soundscape that was created to be repeated in other locations, like at a fashion school’s open house day or at a retail store location. Perhaps also those tuning in from home via a live stream could also experience elements of the created soundscape as well. The concept is innovative in that the process of creating the sounds to be played back live at the show will involve sound design and engineering techniques that haven’t been deployed at a show before. At least not in the ways that we’re thinking. The insights that drove this idea to an actual concept is that sound is a member of the new media family that is often downplayed to the favor of the visual sense. In fact, what most people don’t realize is that sound is creating a large majority of the emotional experience of looking at an image.

“A highly visual portal to store and share parts of the creative process” This concept is a digital toolkit that makes it possible render student-submitted digital artefacts of the creative process in a 3D space timeline. Digital artefacts are any piece of material such as a video, a sound clip, an image, or digital representations of things in the physical world like a swatch of fabric or a handwritten note. This system would allow the artefacts to be approached real-time collectively and re-arranged, filed, or even just simply perused. The insight that led us to developing this concept was that the necessity of documenting the physicality of fashion’s creative process is afforded in the difficulty of repeating it. What makes this concept innovative is that the environment in which the digital artefacts exists contributes to their usefulness.

Our assigner came to the MediaLAB for our presentation yesterday, and the discussion that followed was delightedly deep and meaningful. Although ‘mum’s the word’ for which specific idea has been chosen, we’re proud of having developed together and delivered three feasible, viable and desirable solution concepts to our innovation partner. For now, it’s off to work – we’re running a “sprint” research phase, in which we’re making the planning for the final ten weeks of the project!

By kwaldbillig March 20th, 2013

C o n c e p t _ d e v e l o p m e n t s

Three directions

This week has been one of asking critical questions. Each member of the team has been tasked with playing Devil’s advocate for each other’s big ideas. We’re not only getting serious about how a particular concept might be technically feasible, but pushing each other as to the “why should people care?” aspects as well. This hasn’t led to an all out fistfight (luckily), but has definitely led each of us to have a deeper motivation to make something that really “hits the nail on the head”.

Reviewing our research question and the insights from our research phase has helped us sincerely in getting back down to earth from the idea generation phase. We pitched our three main concepts to our peers yesterday, getting feedback not only on our form, but our content. Our visuals need to be decidedly, well, more visual.We’ll spend the rest of the week developing storyboards and lo-fi prototypes to show our assigners how each concept will work.

Each of the concepts is so drastically different from one another it will be very interesting to see which one the assigners take hold to.
We’re finding out just about now how exactly difficult it is to be able to meet all of the needs of all the stakeholders to the project, especially those with differing opinions.

What’s more, we’ve been beginning the quest to work in tandem with the students who are branding, designing, and managing the brand. Of course, their feedback has been critical in helping us understand what’s possible, what’s useful, and what’s outright innovative. Our meetings with them this week have put a spotlight on who we’re actually designing these solutions for – information about the actual end users – vital.

Naturally we’ve been going through reams of flipchart paper, been doing a whole lot of fast talking, and huddling together around a computer screen to tweak visuals for hours on end. Our big presentation’s next Wednesday – over and out until then!

By kwaldbillig March 13th, 2013

I d e a _ g e n e r a t i o n

Ideas? Not enough ideas? Read on.

Time is something we don’t have a lot of here at the MediaLAB, that any LABber would affirm. Charlie Mulholland worked his magic on the group of us yesterday, pushing us to develop ideas. He said 100 ideas to build toward a concept were simply not enough. As Charlie says, 99 out of 100 ideas are “rubbish”.

In part through the use of the ‘75 tools for creative thinking‘ deck, Charlie’s mashup of methods triggered us to develop over 200 ideas in thirty minutes (naturally, the focus was on quantity not quality). After an hour of introducing the concepts of divergent thinking and convergent thinking, this thirty minute sprint put our theory into practice. After the seemingly ridiculous number of Post-It notes were created, we had to make sense of it all. Convergence time: Here’s Myrthe taking a pass at what we discussed for the last hour of our session.

As time is so limited, our goal this week is to converge into three workable concepts. To achieve this, we’re seeking as much input from our colleagues here at the lab. As it concerns our project, our interviews and continuing digital ethnography are helping us to define requirements and functionality for the concepts. In order to build three complete concepts to present to our innovation partner in two week, we still need at least 100 more ideas for our third concept. For next Tuesday, we have to transform these hundreds of ideas into three lo-fidelity visualized models, or paper prototypes. The clock is ticking!

By kwaldbillig March 11th, 2013

D i g i t a l _ M o o d b o a r d s

Groovy moodboards

Although none of us were lucky winners of the €26.4 Staatsloterij, we’re still lucky that we’re beginning the week with a fresh outlook on concepts. After spending the weekend getting inspired, today we’re creating digital moodboards of our inspiration. We spent a large portion of the morning getting familiar with the techniques required to construct digital moodboards. Since we’re still in the early stages of concepting, having a moodboard is valuable because the group can continue to refer to it when we get more attached to concepts. As Marissa would say: “When you’re in the flow, you have a tendency to forget”. When we asked ourselves why a moodboard is useful, we came up with the answer that it triggers the mind to associate what you see with other things, or new ideas. These new ideas wouldn’t come up if we don’t have something digital to spark the imagination.

As it regards making a moodboard that’s digital, its therefore easier to make the board available 24/7 to others, even those outside of the internal group. Initially, we discussed using Pinterest, but it doesn’t have enough functionality to support the tasks we need to do collaboratively. Although Moodshare.co is still in Beta, but we decided to use it because it supports real-time collaboration as well as multiple types of media. Here’s a small screenshot of our work in progress.

By kwaldbillig March 7th, 2013

C o n c e p t i n g _ p h a s e

Workshop brainstorming

Despite his tendency for slapstick humor and making Darth Vader impressions, our morning session on Design Thinking and Brainstorming with 2011 HvA teacher of the year Charlie Mulholland was a smashing success. With his background in the marketing world, the Irishman taught us that a common way to name the needs and wants of a customer are problems. Challenging us to define our stakeholders and why they care about our project.

Problem definition leads to divergent thinking, which eventually must lead to convergent thinking in order to make sense of the “loads of crazy ideas” that are generated during the divergent phase. Charlie showed us a graphic he snagged from TU Delft’s Marc Tassoul to demonstrate that the process of clustering and categorization directly after the divergent phase leads to a better selection of the best ideas.

Charlie says: “An IDEA on it’s own is not enough. Neither is creativity. The difference between creativity and innovation is that creativity is just an adjective. Innovation is an action that turns creative ideas into reality through design”. These creedos will be especially useful, especially considering we’re entering the Twilight Zone of the concepting phase, what those familiar with design thinking would call “the ill-defined problem”.

During the workshop Charlie introduced the 5 W’s and 1H method to help us redefine the problem from the perspectives of all of our stakeholders. By brainstorming out loud as a team, we triggered our brains to think of other options than if we were trying to do the same activity alone silently. The most important rule for any brainstorming activity is that there is no critique or evaluation of ideas. Of course, after this is over, there has to be a critical convergent phase – otherwise all the ideas that came out of brainstorming are essentially useless.

Defining our stakeholders and our interests led us to see our problem in new ways. Although it seemed childish at the outset, asking WHY that particular stakeholder would think that way several times in rapid-fire succession allowed us to uncover additional viewpoints that will be valuable in documenting our user (stakeholder) requirements. Of course Mr. Mulholland gave each team the assignment to come back next week with their user requirements documented. But he gave each team another task – get inspired; get out from behind the computer screen and provoke our minds with new experiences. We’ll present a mood board of our inspirations with our Part II session with Charlie next week. Needless to say, today was a very exciting start to our Concepting phase!

By kwaldbillig March 1st, 2013

T e c h n o l o g y _ a n d _ f a s h i o n

Digital media in fashion culture

Tuesday we met with Sandra Kuijpers, lecturer for the digital body sculptures course at the AMFI. Seeking more information about how technology influences fashion culture, we gained a unique perspective by having Ms. Kuijpers demonstrate Lectra in action. Lectra is a 2D pattern digitization and 3D prototyping CAD/CAM software that allows designers more freedom in experimentation and also leads to more sustainable outcomes. Luckily we’re able to share some screenshots from the program which should indicate the complexity of the software’s functionality and the time investment required to use the expert module, well, expertly. The information we gathered during the interview will be extremely useful in understanding how technology is not only helping to change the process of making garments, but readjusting the priorities of fashion education.

By kwaldbillig February 28th, 2013

D i g i t a l _ e t h n o g r a p h y

Research methods

Now we’re very busy with the last phases of our research, and we’re discovering what makes fashion shows what they are by means of a digital ethnography. The team elected to choose this method because we weren’t finding everything we needed in scholarly databases. Since we’re focused on crafting a visual presentation with new media, we needed more than just a textual review. The compressed period of the research phase made it critical that we find a way to examine the massive amount of video content that exists documenting the proceedings of fashion shows. The platform that the group would use for this method also needed to be able to capture interactions around the videos; encouraging not only discussion within the group but documenting the degree of buzz that any video gathered.

Pinterest, however mainstream, became the fastest and easiest way to keep track and analyze the multitudes of clips that we came across when searching for the most innovative catwalks to date. One of our group members set up a pinboard that we could share with the group supervisors as well as our peers to discuss our findings. Check it out!

By kwaldbillig February 19th, 2013

I n s p i r a t i o n _ M o n d a y

Last week our group has mostly been orientating. We have had an interesting and inspirational tour in the building of the AMFI. And we got a clear idea of what our project will contain. To give you an idea; the project will be about the brand iNDiViDUALS that is leaded by the students of AMFI. The goal of our project is to think of an innovative concept for the brand iNDiViDUALS to present its new clothing collections.

At this moment we are very busy researching what kind of innovative concepts with fashion shows have already been executed. And we are also looking for fashion brands that have used digital media to improve their fashion shows, just to have some inspiration.

As told, last week we also had to make a video of the User Scene. We think that the video works out quite well to describe how we understand the problems, situations, and feelings of our users. Please let us know what you think in a comment, we’d love to hear some reactions!

By kwaldbillig February 14th, 2013

K i c k _ o f f !

Start of the project

Day one of the project felt like a real kick-off. There has been no time for sitting around and daydreaming about the weekend, except during the well-arranged lunch by the project managers GG (Gijs) and Matthijs.

To get an idea of what our project entails: in cooperation with the Amsterdam Fashion Institute we, as interns of the MediaLab, will develop a new and innovative concept for the fashion brand of AMFI ‘Individuals’ to present her new fashion collections. During the project we will keep you updated with photos, videos and written updates as much as we can.

Like the other groups of the different MediaLab projects, our group had to start thinking about what benefit(s) our project will bring and to whom. We have the task to create a visual presentation of our user, the environment and specific user-moments. We are already pushed to think of who our user is or better said; who are the users.

The first day also meant becoming aware of all the deadlines that we will have to realize. Since most of our time in the upcoming weeks will be spent in the innovative studio of the MediaLab, we can put our creative thinking into practice. We are looking forward to it!

CREATING TOMORROW