Social
Spaces

As already mentioned on this blog, Social Spaces (and more precisely Maarten, Selina, Kris, Katrien & Niels) is participating in a European research project called Open Garments. Open Garments is a European Commission funded research projects where academic and industrial partners in the textile industry collaborate. The aim of Open Garments is amongst others to create an online system and a new business model that will enable the consumer to act more directly in the garment supply chain: end consumers are empowered to work in close collaboration with the textile industry to buy, design, produce, share and sell fabrics, clothing or accessories.

Social Spaces was invited by the Rooms for Free-project which also (indirectly) participates in the Open Garments project. Rooms for Free is a network of textile and fashion design academies. Rooms for Free is a meeting point and a community of practice for textile and fashion design students and professionals. Moreover, it stimulates professionalism for the design students by setting up various design contests. At the HeimTextil fair, Rooms for Free presented a sample of the creations of 15 textile and fashion academies and the results of last year design contest (see picture). Besides this, Rooms for Free organised a workshop on “Online Design Communities and online Production Networks“.

First guests were Prof Dr Thomas Fischer and Alexander Artschwager from DITF who talked about the results of the 2010 Rooms For Free design contest and gave a preview of this year’s contest: CCCreate Your Own Crush!. The contests challenges young designers to create a men’s shirt with an individualized textile surface design. The winner of the contest will be eligible for an internship in Berlin at Clasen, a garment maker specialising in premium quality collections for high-end mail order and online catalogues. Each finalist will get one custom made shirt with their submitted print design and a selection of the finalists’ prints and winning shirts will be shown in an installation during Heimtextil 2012. The CCCreate your own crush contest is organised in the context of the Open Garments project and runs in collaboration with Color-Textil and the Belgian based company Bivolino.

Social Spaces gave a presentation on the benefits and problems/issues when using online communities and social media. The presentation first focussed on what an online community is and why social media is in fact nothing new (but has always been around). Examples coming from politics, journalism and the music industry had to proof the possible disruption online communities and social media may mean to the professional world.

For the designer world a disruption/change can be seen on several levels. At first, social media & online communities seem perfect places to show your skills as a designer. Several portfolio networks exist online. They are ideal places to get inspired, find new opportunities for collaboration, comment on each other’s work, find a new job,… Besides this, online communities and social media help you in getting rid of the intermediaries: the companies, people, organisations,… which stand in between a direct contact from you, the designer, to the end consumer, production company or store. A site like Blurb.com enables you not only to produce your own portfolio book, but also sell it directly to those interested. The social in social media also comes forth in places for collective intelligence: examples of this are Instructables and Kuler. The last one tries to be a place to share and discuss color palette.

The use of online communities and social media raises some questions/issues as well. Your design can easily be copied as you give away quite some info online (this was discussed later that day. See discussion notes below). To have a direct and ad-hoc contact with your commissioner or end-consumer holds a chance for abuse: there is no in-between protecting you, setting certain wage standards, and so on. A often heard mistake is that people believe social media or online communities to be easier to use or holding a promise of a larger reach.
This is however not true: using social media & online communities requires quite some work and costs time. The best is to use a mixed approach of physical meetings, paper portfolio sharing and face 2 face contacts in combination with the online tools that are at hand. The basic elements of succes still are passion, quality, professionalism,…

Heimtextil – online communities and social media for designers

Discussion notes

After the presentations, a discussion was held. Some minor notes on this:

copypaste – there was a discussion on the fear people have on sharing things online: won’t we give away all our great ideas. A suggestion was made to not show exactly the things you create in detail, but visually trying to express your unique way of working or the affective suggestion or emotional qualities your work tries to express as is done for example with a product like perfume. There are some open, but protective sharing regulations (see for example http://creativecommons.org/). Sharing (and eventually copying/getting-inspired-by-others) seems also to be a neccessity and has always been at the core of the fashion industry.

Part of the discussion went to experiences design academies had with Room for free: questions arrising from this discussion seem to be of value for communities in general: what level of freedom and how much limit to the freedom must be taken into account? Some participants requested more freedom in the contest by also creating the patterns. The uniqueness of the contest is however to create designs within the limitations of a professional situation: working with fixed patterns.

Before and during the workshop a question-and-answer-cluster was created. Some elements coming from this cluster are listed below.

Online design communities are perceived as an ideal place to get in touch with other designers and to broaden your network. besides this, it is also a great chance to share ideas and co-operate with others. It is also felt that being part of groups of designers online gives you more visible reliability towards potential clients.

Belonging to a larger group will also help you to protect your copyright and to get insights on how to set a price for a design job.

Most of the participants didn’t have a production network and they mostly used their informal network of friends to sell or share their designs. They however would love to have a place to produce their designs.

As examples of online gathering places for designers the participants of the workshop suggested StyleSight, WGSN, Trendy Girl, Alliance Française des Designers, Trends Now .

Portfolio networks:

DeviantArt – General

Designerpages – For architects

Dribbble – graphic design

Coroflot ⁻ portolfio and job board

Behance – general design, lot of interaction possibilities

Direct from commissioner to designer:

Produce and/or sell your design items directly

Blurb – produce and sell your photobooks

GameCrafter – produce your own cardboard games. Niche.

Etsy – sell your stuff directly. Morsly craft-based.

Shapeways – 3D printing

Ponoko – buy, sell and create your items online. Will start from an ordinary sketch to create your stuff

Direct contact with end consumer

Twitter – microblogging

Facebook Fan Page – create a page for your own “company”

Places of collective intelligence

Instructables – share DIY-knowledge

Kuler – share and discuss color palettes