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1. State of the art, project management and documentation

Research & Ideation

This week we met with the Woolshed team to learn more about the sheep in the Alpine region and the characteristics of the wool and why it is not being used by the fashion industry.

From the 4 pillars from Fabricademy, what I believe are most directly tied to this problematic are: sustainability and the innovation narratives such as alternate business models and circular symbiotic future.

As a native from a semi dessertic area, I was not very familiar with wool. Except I studied in France during winter 2016, was cold all the time and a friend from Finland told me they survive their harsh winter with wool garments. I've been collecting wool sweaters ever since. I hope I can bring a fresh perspective on the current problematic and propose viable solutions.

References & Inspiration

Although I am not sure what my final project will look like, I have been using Pinterest to collect creative concepts I want to explore further. I'm sure I will be referencing them as the program goes on and most likely will come up with more to add to my personal collection.

Some of them are:

  • GridWorld by Alexander Miller - an essay in which he discusses the invisible "grid" that is underneath all reality by which pixels, patterns, objects are arranged. I started noticing how ceramic tiles, pixel art, cross stich, chains, etc are all based on a grid or form one when connected. Eventually, I found Alexander's page and I've been obsessed since. Luckily, wool is a great medium for weaving and knitting so the applications are endless.

  • Molded/Frosting - a technique in which material is piped to create shapes and ornaments, mostly used in baking (cakes) however I've been thinking on how can we bring it to textiles besides the traditional techniques of fabric manipulation. For wool, I believe it could be mixed with another material to be able to 3D print it or mold it to a solid form. Some work I found of what I exactly imagined it to be by Sarah Hambly and the famous Balmain leather dress Zendaya wore in Venice.

corset

Sarah Hambly
  • Cases - I've been thinking on how we buy things and then we buy cases to protect them. Usually these are clear, in plastic materials and it's interesting to think about how much we want to protect these things and how does that translate to the protection of our own feelings, minds, relationships, etc. Last week, at Philadelphia International airport I found this work by artist Christina P. Day. While she comes at it from a different angle, it's similar to what I had envisioned. Not sure how wool can fit here, except for being in between other softer materials such as when used as filling for jackets, but we'll see.

Fabric covered in plastic

Christina P. Day at Philadelphia International Airport


Tools

Documentation workflow. Markdown learnings

I've been thinking about how to make this documentation feel mine. Although I would love to play around with the layout I don't want it to take too much time from the actual creation. So I've looked into what are different forms of documenting things:

  • Photo - I will try to post as many photos as possible. After all, I brought 4 cameras with me to another continent.
  • Video - I've been planning to launch a project on instagram regarding fashion & technology. This could be a great opportunity to share my Fabricademy Journey as it happens. I will post the links here if it comes to life.
  • Text - this documentation page + my journal entries that will be uploaded.
  • Song/Music - I don't think I have this skill haha.
  • Illustration - It's a skill I would love to explore but I'm still a newbie. I will try to make some things on my iPad.

During my work as product manager, I discovered my love for documentation. It was my biggest pet peeve when things were not fully explained or when it was too technical for most people to understand. I looked into it and realized I have a love for taxonomies, templates and guides that describe workflows. I will try to come up with a final product like this that can be useful for future generations.

This is what I learned in Markdown

  1. I find it easier to write when I have a structure of what I want to write and then fill out the rest. So I always start with an outline.
  2. Prepare all images. I created a folder on my computer, labeled it Week 01, gathered, renamed and optimized all images Then I drag them to Gitlab. I found that using my Mac's tools for image resizing it's super simple:

Open image, tools > adjust size >

mac tools

1040pxis a good guideline for WIDTH minimum to avoid having super small images on the site

If the image is still too large (happens a lot with screenshots). Open Image > File > Export > Slide Down the quality to the desired

After Uploading the image to the Gitlab folder, you can just right click on the file name> copy path and paste this in the code to upload images. Image description goes inside [] and the path goes inside () but make sure to change the beginning of the path from ~/docs/ to ..//images/week01/image-name.png 

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  1. Adding videos I use the following code to add my videos so that they play automatically on mute and on loop. You should always replace 2 parts of the URL (link) with that of your video.

Replacing with your video's id

  • After /embed/ until the first question mark: in this case the video id is Ka2mLgWa9xU. (Remove the spaces in the sample URL)
  • Then, also replace after &playlist=: also replace Ka2mLgWa9xU with your video's id

  • The ID comes from the link when you click Share>Embed. It's not the same as the regular URL. The embedd code will not autoplay on mute/loop and won't adjust to the width of the page.

  • For me, it's easier to do 1 collage of all photos and upload as 1 image instead of struggling with alignment.

Look and Feel

I will leave this at the end, prioritizing content. For this first week: - I kept the same font to maintain accesibility. - Changed the colors on the mkdocs here

colors

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