Fashion Design: The Project of the Intangible

Abstract

[EN] This study is part of the surveys conducted in the doctoral research about the methodological tools of fashion design, which focuses in the techniques and methods for the elaboration of visual support of the semantic aspects of clothing products in the educational context. In assessing the design process in this field, it was analyzed the interaction system between the fashion clothing product and its users. An exploratory research was conducted, including literature review and documentary analysis, through which we identified the main requirements of interaction between product and user. The criteria identified as essential for examining the body-artifact-environmental system are distributed in projective parameters of physical adaptation, expression and representation. For these reasons, this article aims to relate concepts drawn from theories of human factors, hedonomics, communication and emotional design, to demonstrate then that fashion clothing is a dynamic and interactive space that mediates the relationship with the environment. Therefore, this text addresses clothing as an amplified interactive space, envisioning exchanges that perform with the body, the surrounding space (physical and cultural) and time. By associating the literature and the documentary analysis of academic practices, it was possible to highlight the key indicators to understand the attributes that guide the development of wearable interfaces. Among these attributes, the communicative potential receives greater emphasis, as these artifacts are converted into individual vehicles of expression and collective identification, becoming instruments of symbolic constructions and mobile records of the space-time relations incorporated in the material culture. The results reinforces the hypothesis of a methodological approach to fashion design in which the visual thinking and systemic reasoning is valued, in order to integrate the socio-cultural codes to the usability requirements of the products, allowing the aesthetic-symbolic factors to create identification links and build the affective experience.