
Hack the black box: Consumer agency in the sharing economy
Fashion design pedagogy in higher education needs to engage with emergent consumer-led consumption schemes that are problematizing the roles of producer and consumer. Traditional fashion design pedagogy does not explicitly teach students to reveal the systems of fashion production to
consumers, thus distancing them from the materials and processes that animate consumer products. Consumers are at a disadvantage as they have little agency over or knowledge of how garments are produced in the global top-down fashion system – a system that could be characterized as a
black box. In response to this, consumers and designers have been employing concepts from hacker culture and the sharing economy in order to participate in novel consumption schemes that focus on underlying values of openness, transparency and collaboration. This article reviews a number of
these schemes, using secondary sources, and proposes that their underlying values be introduced into sustainable fashion curriculums.
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Keywords: collaboration; consumer agency; design methods; maker culture; open source design; transparency
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: Bunka Gakuen University
Publication date: April 1, 2018
How can art, design and communication aid teaching? Do these teaching methods work better in certain fields of study? Focusing on arts and media-based subjects, and encompassing all areas of higher education, this journal reveals the potential value of new educational styles and creative teaching methods.
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