What Happens to Fashion Practice When Child Happiness is the Inspiration?

There is little existing research into how children would design for themselves in the area of Fashion. Other areas of design (including Interior, Architecture and Educational Software) have engaged with children who are the intended end user to help develop their product and concept, and to ensure positive impact on the child user as an outcome; however Fashion hasn’t yet adopted this approach. This PhD study seeks to engage with children between 8 and 12 years old and to explore how they visualise happiness through a series of structured workshops. The study aims to identify patterns in the visual language children use to explore happiness, joy and positivity and to apply these patterns to the design process through developing a range of conceptual and experimental wearable pieces intended for a child audience and wearer. The aim is to explore if the child wearer / audience of these pieces perceive them as happy or positive artefacts as a result.
Existing findings in both Fashion and other design practices will be analysed through documentary analysis. Following this, primary qualitative data collection will take place through a series of creative workshops led by a pilot. It is anticipated that these workshops will include collaging and drawing activities focussed on representing happiness and positivity through both 2 dimensional, and 3 dimensional expression. Data collected through the workshops will be analysed for patterns and trends in representation with these findings being used in the design development process of wearable pieces.