Consumer Experience Digital Tools for Dematerialisation for the Circular Economy. Working with organisations, researchers, brands and repair and refurbish communities to design and develop digital tools that empower consumers to extend product life.
The CXDT project aims to design a series of technologies and digital tools that empower consumers to extend the life of their clothing, helping the UK apparel-textiles sector to achieve ‘zero avoidable waste’ as part of a Circular Economy.
This project:
- Encouraged citizen-consumers to take on the role of ‘custodian’ of a product, using, looking after and enhancing it.
- Worked with citizens and partners to innovate digital tools that empower consumers to extend product life.
- Supported experiences and services for apparel products that are related to care, repair and upgrade.
Programme of Research
Textile materials play an important role in the experience of clothing and how it makes people feel. We suggest that creative digital technologies are starting to become key constituents in product experience. The potential exists for these technologies to be used in the creation of immersive, multisensory and multimodal narratives that are highly relevant to consumers’ emotions and memories. Material experiences could prove critical in consumption behaviour and decision making, and hence our programme of research is underpinned by our position that experiences and services for products must be constituents of a new relationship between consumers and their clothing.
In our programme of research we developed three CX scenarios to examine the human experience of materials and to explore the use phases of clothing.
- ‘I repair’: Supporting consumer-custodians to maintain and repair their garments by accessing mending and customisation techniques and facilitating the development of transferable skills.
- ‘The Brand repairs’: Investigating changing business models to encourage consumers to participate in textiles circularity and capturing information on wear and degradation to inform future material cycles.
- ‘The Community repairs’: Exploring with the community opportunities to collectively share repair and maintenance skills as part of the social refurbishment of garments (e.g. repair shops).
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This project was a partnership between the RCA and UCL and funded by the EPSRC Digital Economy Sustainable Digital Society priority area.