IaaC Bit 8.4.1 by IAAC bits

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8.4.1 Interview

Zoe Romano

Interview: Zoe Romano

(The text that here follows is an extract from an interview prepared by Jordi Vivaldi and executed by Aldo Solazzo.)

In this interview Zoe Romano is mainly talking about the relevance of open source resources in the field of fashion design, specially on those aspects that have been crucial for the competition RESHAPE. Along the text, Zoe will use many references related to other topics and will focus on how can we import the research done in those fields to the notion of fashion design. You stated that experimentation starts from playing. A game that in the world of Makers becomes real and produces innovation. What role new technologies play in this context? That’s a big question. The capacity of experimentation is a skill, a skill to explore new paths without fear, but it is also important the idea of being free of not accounting to anyone. Experimentation is something that can happen and actually is often happening in FabLabs and Makerspaces. In our Fab Lab in particular, we always start with a project that brings enthusiasm towards the experimentation, and it always starts like a game: usually when you research you don’t know where are you going, so you explore several paths without caring that much on the outcomes. You need at least 1000 explorations to get one good innovation, that’s to say, an complete ecosystem of experimentation to get one important innovation. You don’t start from nothing, you need a field of people doing things. You need to accept the idea of loosing your time, because that’s the only manner to produce innovation. In this sense, new technologies are really at the centre of new experimentation. Usually there are some critics from trained designers, that they are complaining about the stupidity of the things that you are doing with a 3dprinter, and specially about the which the quality of these new products. For now is nothing special, but if you don’t play with this and print stupid stuff you cannot develop your projects. It’s the beginning, and trial after trial you will probably come out with solutions: the more people do this, the more innovation will happen in the future. Cover - Fab textiles, IaaC Archive Figure 1 - Lecture Zoe Romano, IaaC Archive 2

The local DIY production in fashion is a growing worldwide phenomena due to the interest shared within many people linked by the network. What are the values and opportunities offered by the DIY? We all know that DIY culture is not a new thing. In Europe we have a lot people before us in the 70-80 that were experimenting a lot with DIY. This freedom of creating its something that is in our tradition. What has changed now compared to the DIY of 70-80 is that now we have new technologies and new challenges to use this capacity. There is a nice quote that everybody likes to refer to of Massimo Banzi that says “You don’t need to ask permission to do something big”. What do we mean by something big? In my opinion is that thing that has impact in the community. Probably it is related to solving a problem or giving opportunities to other people. Right now the market is pretty closed, it is hard to start a new production. However, the movement DIY allow more people to provide new solutions. It is not a matter of creating new products but a matter of creating new solutions. Fashion is specially slower than other fields of creation. What happens in the fashion community

is not as fast as what happens in music, publications etc. It is slow because even if fashion works under a low intellectual property scheme, there is no culture of sharing in the fashion system. You have websites that have classical patterns that you can freely download, but you don’t see any fashion designers sharing technical drawings, only sketches. Beside this problem, fashion design schools are still a bit far away from the digital world.For them the most difficult thing is to deal with digital files and use software, so they do they pattern by hand because they don’t know how to move this pattern to digital platform.

This phenomena that you are underlining could become a big opportunity right for movements like yours right? There is a lot of work to be done in this sense, specially regarding the open source approach and the culture of sharing it. Designers are afraid of sharing it, because they think that then people will copy them and they will loose their ideas and everyone will be able to use it, and they don’t get that when you share something people will recognise that that’s your work and your idea. That’s why it is harder to change the way we use culture than the way we use technology. You have dealt with open source design through the Openware project. The result is the creation of a community. What have been the main elements of this community and why have you decided to join this project? Openware was a project born around 2008, it came from a lot of ideas that came out from the collective that i’m part of. We did a lot of experimentation and thoughts about what is intellectual property in fashion, how we need to experiment to bring the culture of sharing in the fashion system. It is a research more politic and focused on understanding how fashion system works. I brought some of these ideas and with other partners in Europe we applied to a EU funding that allow us to build a community that is based on different values and that is more connected with the DIY culture and sharing culture. We invited designers to have a sharing activity with a topic and we prepared a pattern to be downloaded. We released a licence to use the trademark of the community. It was not just about talking to designers, as usually happens in the field of fashion, but there is a lot of people with skills in production so the idea was that some tailors and crafts could work on it choosing textile etc in order to act locally and referring back to community. It was 2009 and the project lasted until 2012 and then the EU funded ended. We were trying to find new investors to feed more resources to the project, and we got a lot of attention, but it was the second wave of the crisis and we lost the founds. Figure 2 -Fab Lab activity, IaaC Archive

One of the things I want to do is to develop a software to share codes and patterns of the garments. Some people is working on this, interesting software that we are starting to use it but we need more collective work on this to make it really work.

One of the biggest challenges of Reshape is the relation between the restricted rules of the “Market” and the freedom every researcher needs to succeed in his task. Is it possible to merge and balance these two realities translating those differences in an added value? This is the crucial point, the key question. The contemporary world, when you arrive from the university you don’t find companies waiting for you for a job. YOu should find your own path, that’s why making work is important, it allows you to find new people with good skills that can help you to create a new path for your work. That’s why is important to develop skills in technology. It is not possible to just be a good design. You don’t need to be a master in business model, but you need to be able to read and excel file and to understand how it works and how is gonna be distributed your project. One limitation that I see in our domain, is that they focus in the design but they don’t thing in the product as a whole, connected to distribution, selling and marketing. So for example, regarding fashion production, you don’t need to work in a new collection, the notion of collection is obsolete, people are working in catalogues that are not following seasons. We need to find new rules if we want an space in the market in order to connect with new users that are fed up with big brands. We need to set new rules and stop thinking like big brands. New frameworks for new products, its a complete new generation that need to be defined.

Figure 3 - Fab textiles, IaaC Archive 6

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IAAC SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:

Manuel Gausa, IaaC Co-Founder

EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Jordi Vivaldi, IaaC bits Editorial Coordinator

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ADVISORY BOARD: Areti Markopoulou, IaaC Academic Director Tomas Diez, Fab Lab Bcn Director Mathilde Marengo, Academic Coordinator Ricardo Devesa, Advanced Theory Concepts Maite Bravo, Advanced Theory Concepts

Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, Boston Juan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, Madrid Neil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, Boston Hanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, London Vicente Guallart, IaaC Co-Founder Willy Muller, IaaC Co-Founder Aaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, London Nikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Ecologia Urbana, Barcelona Artur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona

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IAAC BIT FIELDS: 1. Theory for Advanced Knowledge 2. Advanced Cities and Territories 3. Advanced Architecture 4. Digital Design and Fabrication 5. Interactive Societies and Technologies 6. Self-Sufficient Lands

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