Consumer Experience (CX) Digital Tools for Dematerialisation for the Circular Economy

Lead Research Organisation: Royal College of Art
Department Name: Materials Science Research Centre

Abstract

Consumer Experience (CX) Digital Tools for Dematerialisation for the Circular Economy
- for the design of a new generation of 'Product Cultures' that promote human wellbeing and people's agency in environmental sustainability

The much expounded sustainability strategy of dematerialisation - buying less and extending the life of products - is now starting to gain significant traction in the general consciousness on account of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Our eco-design strategy for dematerialisation is focused on gaining a fine grained understanding of human experience in order to extend 'product offerings' that would decouple the use of material resources from human wellbeing and economic development, by designing experiences and services related to products that include care, update/upgrade, repair, and recycling. The central idea is that by designing experiences and services for products, value that is based on human wellbeing needs can be added to them.

We aim to shape new cultures of consumption that will meet the demands of the market for greater sustainability, whilst giving consumers greater agency to respect their environment - becoming custodians rather than consumers. This requires a new relationship between consumers and their products. We believe that experiences and services for products must be constituents of this relationship, hence the challenge is to translate our understanding of needs related to human wellbeing into the design of product-experience-service offerings.

We will innovate CX Digital Tools to support experiences and services for physical apparel products that are related to care, repair and update/upgrade in order to keep apparel in use for as long as possible. We will define a set of scenarios and associated technologies for new cultures of CE, by gaining understanding of how social and digital actors (the consumer-public, charity shops, repair initiatives, clothes swapping initiatives, apparel brands, retailers, and digital-electronics hacker communities) come together to enact a CE. We will innovate new sensing and perceptual technologies based on novel computer vision and machine learning architecture to be used by consumers to understand materials and materials degradation, to make decisions of material reparation and to express their perceptions around aged, repaired, updated/upgraded products. We will evaluate user interactions and perceptions derived from scenarios, with a methodological contribution to the evaluation that combines our HCI, social sciences, design and phenomenological approaches.

The CX Digital Tools is designed and specified using our Circular Experience Model we have conceptualised, which has four categories: 1) Pre-Ownership; 2) During Ownership; 3) Giving up Ownership; 4) Post Ownership. We will use these four categories to design a set of experiences and services for apparel products that are focused on the human perceptual experience of materials - specifically, materials from waste and recycled materials, ageing and wear, repair, and update/upgrade.

We will adopt a Citizen Science approach in order to design and test experiences and services with consumers and stakeholders. Through this approach we will ensure that we are reducing the need to develop new technology products, as we will seek to work with digital technologies that consumers already possess, which forms part of our approach to mitigate environmental impacts both in our research programme as in the outcomes of it.

This 30 month project will be led by the Materials Science Research Centre at the Royal College of Art in partnership with UCL - the University College London Interaction Centre, Computer Science Department, and the Knowledge Lab.

Publications

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Title Repair Toolkit 
Description The repair toolkit consists of a deck of cards that makes the characteristics and features of clothing repair practices explicit through its design. 
Type Of Art Artefact (including digital) 
Year Produced 2022 
Impact The repair toolkit contributes a process model to reveal stages and steps required to perform a repair procedure. It was developed to enable researchers and practitioners to understand the skills and competencies needed by citizen-consumers to engage in clothing repair practices. Additionally, the repair toolkit guides the specification of digital tools that will help support people to engage in clothing repair practices. 
 
Description We have revealed insights relating types of repair practices and pathways operating across our three scenarios ('I repair', 'The Brand repairs', 'The Community repairs') including the state of repair practices and tools; how people develope materials experience; garment life-extension strategies and techniques; building community, identifying societal challenges and ideas to scale repair.

These insights have been used to develop concept cards toolkit to map the repair process, examine the core competences, activities and techniques required to initiate a repair procedure. This will help us to determine the specification of digital tools that can help support people to engage in clothing repair practices.
Exploitation Route These insights are published in
(2024) Hernandez, Lucie , Petreca, Bruna , Baurley, Sharon, Berthouze, Nadia and Chou, Youngjun. Examining clothing repair practices, core competences, techniques, tools and community structures involved in extending the life of garments. International Journal of Sustainable Fashion & Textiles. 0-0. ISSN 2754-026X
Sectors Creative Economy

Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

 
Title FabricTouch dataset 
Description FabricTouch dataset is a multimodal dataset of fabric assessment touch gestures. The dataset consists of bilateral forearm movement and muscle activity data captured while 15 people explored 114 different garments in total to evaluate them according to 5 properties (warmth, thickness, smoothness, softness, and flexibility). In addition, to understanding fabrics action, the dataset is being extended to include repair related actions, e.g. observing damage, threading a needle and practicing stitches for repair. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2023 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact The dataset further includes subjective ratings of the garments with respect to each property and ratings of pleasure experienced in exploring the garment through touch. The dataset is collected with the support of the EPSRC TCC project , EPSRC CXDT project and H2020 EnTimeMent project. For more details see: An initial version of the dataset is presented in: Olugbade, Temitayo; Lin, Lili; Sansoni, Alice; Warawita, Nihara; Gan, Yuanze; Wei, Xijia; Petreca, Bruna; Boccignone, Giuseppe; Atkinson, Douglas; Cho, Youngjun; Baurley, Sharon; Berthouze, Nadia; (2023). FabricTouch: A Multimodal Fabric Assessment Touch Gesture Dataset to Slow Down Fast Fashion. Proceedings of the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. IEEE: Cambridge, MA, USA. 
 
Title RGB-T image textile damage dataset (prepared, yet not released) 
Description From a series of workshops and visits to repair communities, we collected over 1200 pairs of RGB and Thermal images of damaged textile materials. The pairs were fully annotated by three researchers from over 100 hour- manual annotation sessions, producing a novel dataset on textile damage. The dataset facilitates work on a damage detector tool that can detect clothing damage using RGB and Thermal imagery. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2023 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact There are a lack of RGB-T datasets on textile material damage. Hence, this opens a new opportunity for researchers and practitioners to explore it and advance machine learning models. 
 
Description Mike Vanis 
Organisation Northumbria University
Department Northumbria School of Design
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution The project is working with Mike Vanis on designing research studies.
Collaborator Contribution Mike Vanis is working with the project as a technology consultant. He participates in the design of research studies by providing expert knowledge and guidance on technology developments, software and hardware systems and linking the project to a network of technologists and hackers.
Impact None yet
Start Year 2023
 
Title Damage Segmentation network V1 
Description We have developed a Damage Segmentation network version 1, with the dataset above. A novel component is a multi-modal hybrid loss that consists of a self-supervised and a supervised loss. This implicitly reduces the gap between different modalities. 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2023 
Impact The proposed training loss can effectively cluster cross-modal feature representations for segmenting damaged parts on images. 
 
Description Great Big Green Week 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact The workshop was an opportunity for professional repair practitioners and industry specialists to;
1) Experience demonstrations of digital tools and new technologies, which act as 'props' to stimulate ideas, visions, desires or reflections.
2) Learn about new technologies and their role in supporting clothes repair.
3) Share and exchange ideas to develop material knowledge and repair techniques in a group situation in response to the digital tools presented.
4) Contribute 'inspirational data' that can guide the design of the project tools.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description Interviews with a wide range of people on the repairs they have performed on their clothing 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Interviews were held with different types of people in order to gain an understanding of general tendencies across society to engage in clothes repair and customisation practices, as well as the knowledge and skills required to perform caring actions on the clothes.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description London Repair Week: CXDT Workshops 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact The exhibition and workshops were an opportunity to define the context, process and properties of repair activities to inform the design and development of digital tools. The workshops and focus group activities would enable participants to to learn about new technologies and their future role in supporting clothes repair and identify the specific features of the repair process that would benefit from digital tool development.
The research team applied speculative design methods to support people to become involved in shaping and integrating technological tools into the repair process. These methods enabled people to co-imagine, ideate and generate material that could facilitate technology development.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description Regenerative Fashion Hub 2022 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact 10 people attended workshop studies as part of the regenerative fashion hub, which were an opportunity to understand people's clothing repair practices and investigate consumers' motivations to engage in repair or upcycle behaviour. Research activities were designed to understand repair practices and contribute to developing digital tools for supporting people to undertake their own repairs. Additionally, the project team assessed material types, properties and processes of damage and degradation to contribute to developing a material dataset.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description Research studies with different user groups: Repair and Renew Circle: Inspiring and Sharing Opportunities for Clothes Repair 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact We hosted a research study entitled 'Repair and Renew Circle: Inspiring and Sharing Opportunities for Clothes Repair' which sought to explore how renew, repair, refresh could be routes to the circular economy.
During the Repair and Renew Circle - participants had an opportunity to share and exchange material knowledge and repair techniques in a group situation.

During the studies, we explored decision-making involved in repair processes, and renewal and repair processes from a consumer perspective, by exploring ideas related to:
- The sequence of repair and steps involved (e.g., through material damage assessment / diagnosis, noticing damage as it occurs, advice, decision making).
- Decisions around repair type and describing issues that influence the choice of repair or renewal technique.
- Examining knowledge, skill and tool use in carrying out a repair.
- Motivations for repair and renewal - e.g., levels of interest in a garment, attachment or other reason to repair, relationship to clothing, wearing repaired clothing, types of care and connection to self-image.

Participants underwent this exploration through a damaged item of clothing they brought to the study, through interacting with a repair specialist, and through use of worksheets.
Participants were able to gain insight into techniques related to repair, and they were also able to learn about the Circular Economy, as the studies were hosted in the Regenerative Fashion Hub, a six week showcase of the research of the UKRI Interdisciplinary Textiles Circularity Centre.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022