WORK IN PROGRESS

Can Metadesign Rehabilitate the Global Fashion Paradigm?

(these three videos are from a presentation given at the First International Metadesign Congress Brazil, 13th March 2025)

1. Why Do We Need Metadesign?

2. 10 Key Ideas in Metadesign

3. Modifying the DNA of Fashion

1. 'Why Do We Need Metadesign?' - outlines some of design's limitations
2. '10 Key Ideas in Metadesign' - from previous EPSRC/AHRC funded research
3. 'Modifying the DNA of Fashion' - is forthcoming work with the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, UAL

Previous metadesign research

Our research team at Goldsmiths University of London received its first significant EPSRC/AHRC research funding in 2005. The title of this project was An Open Source Design Cluster that uses Synergy Tools to Guide the Effective Development of a 'Meta-Design' Methodology. In effect we asked ourselves whether design as we know it could deliver synergies rather than products and services. Our work led to publications including our most recent (edited) book Metadesigning Designing in the Anthropocene (Wood, 2022). We began by acknowledging the failure of design (i.e. profession / discipline) to shape the world in ways that ensure our long-term survival. As this implies, metadesign will need heuristics that reconcile both bottom-up and top-down tactics. These will need to include novel transdisciplinary, political and comprehensive processes of co-creativity that blur the lines between designers and users of design.