A couple years ago I collaborated with our Interactive Arts & Technology Librarian on a series of posts about one of the "wicked problems" of our modern world: sustainability in the textile & fashion industries.
That series was published to support an interdisciplinary cohort of students in our Business of Design program, all of whom were working on projects to change the way fashion and its materials are designed, produced, purchased, and discarded... change of the sort that our world so desperately needs.
The word "change" is key here. The Business of Design program has changed to Make Change Studio, but the students involved are still trying to change the world, and they've returned to the topic of fixing fast fashion.
"Water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink"
It's rare that we get a chance to quote poetry here in the BUEC Buzz, let alone a 185-year-old poem by a master like Samuel Coleridge... but this line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is oddly apropos of the frustration involved in trying to research a local market in our information age.
We are all awash in information, so it can seem like doing good market research requires just a Google search or two — a quick dip with a cup over the side of the boat...
We are all so much more than our age, income, opinions, orshopping habits... right? Certainly we can't be dropped into simple boxes like that and expect to have much in common with our box-mates...
But what if you change the "or" of my first sentence into an "and"?
My middle-aged, middle-income, ethnically diverse, andenvironmentally conscious household-with-teens is probably more similar to other households that tick all of those boxes than it is to a random Canadian household. [...]
This argument is at the root of the concept of psychographic clusters...
