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Designing Against Waste

As a designer of textile accessories, we often are challenged with, and guilty of, allowing too much waste to be a by-product of our efforts. As a result, we contribute to the waste issue and environmental impact that seems to plague out industry. Even our Polyesters, the one fabric with some hope for reducing the environmental impact, are covered in nasty coatings like PU and PVC that prohibit the direct recycling effort we would all prefer. And the Nylon, well, forget it.

So what do we do? Do we satisfy ourselves with 92% yields and let the 8% run wild to the landfill? None of us want that, so how can we change the status quo and begin to truly design without waste as the directive? This challenges everything we have historically performed in design. Considering that the width of a roll of fabric will dictate our design is somewhat counter to what would normally have been conceived through our inspiration, however, this reverses our traditional thought process into working from the waste perspective instead of the design itself. They are closely related and one can dictate the other in balance if we work to find that balance in the first place.

The Gap Between Design and Development

Bridging the gap between a design and development is not always easy. Take for instance, this web page. Half a simple assignment for most developers, half a simple assignment for a designer. I can excel in design, often working diligently into the wee hours of the night with multiple revisions simultaneously taking shape as my thoughts go to different colors and attributes, different layouts and inspirations. When developing a site, I am similarily performing the same task with mutliple index.html files in folders while I attempt to code the design I came up with and turn it into a working site. The gap, however, for me is large. Coding is not something I really have much interest in, however, I completely understand why the designer only benefits from understanding the basics of it's working mechanisms. In this assignment, I have come up short a few times and exceeded my expectation elsewhere. The problem is that my proficiency with coding is in it's infancy, while my time with design has been many years.