THE NØRGAARD PROJECT
THE NØRGAARD BRAND AND THE SARTORIAL SYSTEMS
seasonal collections and pre-‐collections, of international fashion weeks, and of seasonal their interest in re-‐finding lost 'clothes companions' through made-‐to-‐measure wares or tailoring.
Next steps
After this project, the interest I was already nurturing in the discrepancy between the production and the consumption of dress objects only increased. Finding that sensory aspects of dressing meant so much in the decision-‐making processes of my informants, I now yearned to explore the gap between a visual orientation towards stylistic codes and a sensory orientation towards shapes, textures, smells, and the tactility of dressing. And last not least, I wanted to explore the way that these elements help constitute a
sensation of 'feeling right' in the wearer's mind. Fuelled by this, my basic idea was that nobody, apart from the users, knows so well the three-‐dimensional and tactile aspects of dress objects than does a designer. I was very influenced by the way we had been
discussing these aspects at my workplace at Design School Kolding. How particularly, since the early 1990s, the frequency of change in fashion has been increasing, forcing designers to work with dress objects as 'looks': flat, two-‐dimensional shapes that reflect the latest trends. While this is particularly true in the ‘high street’ sector, this
development has affected the remaining sectors of the fashion industry as well. This has been mirrored by constant cutbacks in curriculum of design skills like cutting out or drawing at most Western design schools during recent decades, a reality that I have previously discussed in my report, Fashion Research at Design Schools (Skjold 2008).
Because of all this, I was curious to see whether my wardrobe research might be a way to reflect more deeply on these issues in the context of collaborating with a designer.
This entailed that I now wished to turn from focusing on an industry perspective to focusing on the way that fashion designers are being taught to design, and on the way that they design when they go forth to work in the industry. I therefore accepted a call from the department of product design at Kolding, where they asked me to apply my wardrobe research to shoe design. The Danish shoe company, ECCO, had agreed to set up a collaborative program with Kolding that consisted of teaching, seminars,
workshops, and research projects. They were evidently interested in my approach, and I accepted the invitation. Thereby, the format of the project was in some ways defined by this reality, but I found that I could turn such constraints and alterations to my
advantage.
So, what I have done in this next project is to try and have a second filter on my interviews, in the shape figure of a designer that I collaborate with. Together, we
conducted four wardrobe sessions – with only minor adjustments in method, but the overall method was altered to include a designer's point of view. It is particularly in this part of the thesis that I see an entanglement of method and outcome, such as described by Binder & Brandt (2008). Thus, the clustering method became very central here, as a main central tool for dialogue between me and the designer I was workinged with and me. Prior to the project, which was conducted between August 2011 and June 2012, I had had enjoyed the opportunity of trying out my wardrobe sessions together with students at Design School Kolding. In the aAutumn of 2010, I had a small study group with volunteers, carrying out work that was based on my idea of wardrobe research.
This way, I had had gained some experience as to how designers might approached the whole idea of wardrobes, and how they might engage with user experience in their design processes. In the initial phase of the project, this resulted in a kick-‐off lecture for a workshop-‐series in Kolding about shoe design. The fact that this third part of my thesis came to be about shoes was caused by outside external factors, but to for me this served to it contributed to my reflections about sensory anchoring; no other dress object can highlight sensory aspects of dressing better than shoes, since they, in particular, form the way we walk, run, dance, and pose. Accordingly, as designer Helle Graabæk and I worked our way through the interviews and analysing processes, we were very observant of how our informants experienced their shoes through their sensory
apparatus. How certain smells, sounds, tactile qualities played a role in the processes of selecting shoes, as well as the way the informants bodies were manipulated to move and pose in certain ways by their shoes. Altogether, we became highly absorbed in how it felt for the wearer to be inside of the shoe. This attitude coloured the whole project, and thereby Ingold's concept of 'dwelling' (Ingold 2000/2004/2008) took on paramount importance as a dialogic tool, and as well the framework proposed by Jordan in the field of 'emotional design' (Jordan 2000) did. These texts were not only used to frame the project theoretically, but also functioned, in a very ‘hands-‐on’ manner, as dialogic tools that could generate shared understandings of the field work material, and expose our different biases. The final output thereby became the process of dialogue between Graabæk and me, giving rise to reflections on the limitations, potentials and perspectives of the wardrobe sessions in relation to design processes.
PART III
THE ECCO PROJECT