Buy less, choose well, make it last
This week our team dedicated time to define and scope our challenge statement. It was necessary for us to have a frame in which we can explore. This blog post describes: how we scoped our challenge, what is our chosen problem focus and why it matters.
HOW - Our approach to scoping the challenge.
Step 1: Questions & assumptions The client brief was very vast, broad and could be interpreted in many ways. This left us feeling rather overwhelmed and not knowing where to start. Therefore we began with a simple brainstorm of our individual understandings of the brief. This is important because when working in teams each person has a different understanding of the same thing. This shined light on our different perspectives and allowed us to come up with a selection of questions which we have regarding the challenge.
Step 2: Aligning with client Stakeholder The next thing we did is to have a meeting with the client stakeholder in order to raise the questions we had. The questions were not there as a checklist but rather as a means to facilitate a discussion with the client. We gained clarity on the intention of the project and who are the various players involved. We also realised that some questions did not have clear answers yet and it was in our hand to define them.
Step 3: Research plan & preliminary research
Step 4: Formulating a challenge statement.
After doing a preliminary research on the textile and fast fashion industry our team brainstormed different angles or sub-challenges which we find interesting to focus on. We were intrigued by the overproduction of clothing and textile waste which seemed to be a prominent issue. We then summarised our thoughts into a challenge statement. Here are our ideas below. Which challenge statement do you prefer?
WHAT - Challenge, causes & consequences? Textile waste & overproduction
Fashion retailers follow an accelerated consumption model and therefore produce high amounts of textile & clothing in order to benefit from economies of scales. However, this accelerated consumption model produces much more clothing than what is consumed or needed. This leaves huge amounts of textile waste. In fact in Europe alone there are 5.6 million tonnes of yearly textile waste. The main challenges to recycling these textiles are the mixed fibres and hazardous substances which they comprise of. Moreover, textiles are the 5th highest greenhouse gas emission category in the EU. This lead us to ask ourselves:
How can we transform the fast fashion industry in order to reduce textile waste and over production ?
