Ian Soe

Week 1- Intro to sustainability

For this week, I explored natural dyeing with turmeric and beetroot. I was able to produce a yellow and pink hue in my fabrics by the end. It was cool to just use natural ingredients to dye fabrics and just dump the excess water in my plants and soil in the end. Every product that I used was able to be either recycled, reused, composted, or digested after usage.

Week 2- Emerging Technologies in Fashion

For this week I decided to make prints using online platforms such as Adobe Illustrator and Google Drawing. It was really fun to make a print on the computer rather than drawing it all by hand on paper and colouring it with different medias. For Google, I used the pre-existing functions like the existing symbols and the polygonal shape tool maker to make the elements of my print. I also used their pre-existing colours to determine my colour scheme. For Illustrator, I made the squiggly lines using the bendy line shape tool and made a ton. I then layered it on top of a coloured background.

Week 3- Nature

For this week, I explored potato printing, which is printing using potato vegetables. I cut my potatoes into different shapes and used them as stencils for my prints. I dipped the stencils into different paints and started printing. The process was really cool because potatoes have ridges and lines and shapes within itself, so the prints came out more complex. Even though one of my stencils was just an oval, the ridges of the inside of the potato made the print come more alive and brought more character and personality in the print.

Week 4

For this week’s cultural sustainability, I decided to look at Chinese embroidery, specifically Guangzhou embroidery. My ancestors are originally from the Guangzhou province in China. It’s also known as Cantonese embroidery and it is characterised as ivid images, bright colors, and has to do with nature. I chose to embroider a leaf from my hometown in California, USA. I tried to melt the two cultures together by using a traditional technique while choosing a subject of the second location.

Week 5

For this week’s empathy, I decided to design ear pieces that complement hearing aids. I got this idea after watching season 5 of Skam France, where a character is embarrassed to wear his hearing aids because of how they looked. Hearing aids are treated as a piece of machinery and aren’t viewed as cool looking. I wanted to change that by designing hearing aids that visually and aesthetically look good so wearers wouldn’t be ashamed to wear them.

Reflection

From this unit, I learned a lot about the textile industry and how there’s many people trying to achieve different things and have different motivations. I also learned a lot about new design processes and techniques which I can utilise after this, my design process has shifted after learning how certain sustainable techniques are not only super effective, but they are also really easy to do and don’t take much time, energy, or resources and complete and get done. I felt like I benefitted a lot from this unit because it taught me to explore so many aspects that I never thought about to explore. A part of this unit I didn’t really enjoy was how it was all done online and how drawn out it was. With it being online, it became more confusing and harder to navigate when having a hard time. The spacing between the topics also felt really long, I felt like they could’ve been condensed so we could have more time to complete the later tasks. Overall I have been productive throughout this unit and have produced works that I am proud about. I am also very pleased with exploring different ways to produce art and to execute my designs. This unit has taught me a lot about different aspects the textile industry and how so many people are able to find niches within the industry to foster and create a community. This unit also helped me lots in terms of ways to explore and expand my creativity.