Critical Textile Topologies X Planet City: the intersection of design practice and research
Holly McQuillan, Kathryn Walters, Karin Peterson · Research in Arts and Education · 2021
Holly McQuillan's work, in the field of zero waste fashion design, articulates sustainable systems thinking and practice.She focuses on issues such as the impact of technology and how these can challenge established design, production and use practices.She co-authored Zero Waste Fashion Design, co-curated Yield: Making fashion without making waste, and developed the award winning Make/Use.Her work always seeks to broaden the impact of zero waste and sustainable fashion design through research, publication, workshops and lectures.Kathryn Walters is a PhD researcher in the field of smart textile design.Her work explores woven textiles as complex systems, capable of transformative and reactive behaviour based on the synergistic combination of their materials and structure, while simultaneously seeking to investigate the potential threedimensional morphologies that can arise and derive from flat-woven textiles.Her research aims to demonstrate the potential for emergent behaviour as an alternative to electronic smart textiles.Karin Peterson's work seeks to relate alternative materials and mediums to processes of dress.It speculates the role of the analogue and the digital, examining these in relation to their function and interaction within a coherent and alternative method for crafting dress, different to that of the currently dominant cut and assemble.The work's context is the intertwined relation of cut and assemble as a method for artistic expression and as a system for mass production, or hyper consumption.