Sharon Baurley

Dr Sharon Baurley is a Reader in the School of Fashion and Textile Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. She has conducted both doctoral and post-doctoral research at the Royal College of Art, London, Musashino Art University, Tokyo, and John Moores University, Liverpool. Her principal focus was developing new textile materials for fashion through transferring technology from the technical textiles sector to design (3D textiles, holographic textiles). She has consulted for Courtaulds Textiles, London, Gianni Versace, Milan, Marks & Spencer, London, and Unilever, UK, and produced design work for Design Intelligence, UK, and Mantero, Italy. She has been awarded numerous national and international design awards including the Josef Otten Award for Technical Innovation and the Ideacomo Award for Printing and Dyeing from the Japanese Fashion Foundation. Sharon has lectured in technical textiles and design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, the Royal College of Art, London, Musashino Art University, Tokyo and Nagoya University of Arts, Nagoya, Japan, the Architectural Association, London, and Kingston University. Sharon is a member of AHRC Peer Review College, has conducted peer review for the Leverhulme Trust, the EPSRC, and the Technology Strategy Board. She is a member of the Academic Group of the TechniTex Faraday Partnership; and a member of the commissioning panel for the AHRC initiative 'Beyond Text'. She sits on the Programme Committee for the Avantex Symposium (Germany), on the Smart Materials and Systems Committee of the Institute of Materials, UK, and on the Board of SMART.mat, a node of the Materials KTN. She is a member of the programme committe for The Second International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions (ACHI), Cancun, February 2009, part of Digital World 2009. Sharon is also a London Technology Network business fellow.

We use fashion and clothing to define ourselves, and form ourselves into social groups and communities. What is happening now is that digital communications technologies increasingly share common attributes with fashion/clothing in terms of how they enable people to construct an identity, to be expressive, to differentiate themselves, and declare their uniqueness, which enables communication between people allowing them to form communities. The revolutionary growth of digital media and communications is allowing smaller groups and individuals to collaborate, create and share their own material.

When fashion converges with ICT and materials technology, what will happen? We can’t anticipate all of the end-use applications in advance because what actually happens in practice is the emergent outcome of user dynamics, e.g., texting caught service providers by surprise. If we extrapolate from what is happening in mobile and web-based communications and apply that thinking to new genres of products such as clothing that are networked and dynamically changeable, will we see similar patterns of behaviour emerging? How can we gain prior knowledge of emergent behaviour? These new genres of products have the potential to empower people, but how can we understand what they are capable of doing? I am concerned with the process of eliciting consumer desire in order to gain insight into the catalysts and drivers and potential emergent consumer behaviour for this new genre of fashion/clothing.

Sharon is also interested in the use of design as a way of thinking to scope this unknown territory. This new genre of clothing will require input from an array of sectors, who do not have a history of working together. I am also interested in utilising design to facilitate multi-disciplinary working, in order to manage knowledge flows between people, to facilitate knowledge creation and sharing, and shared understanding.

From 2003 to 2006 I conducted an AHRC-funded Research Fellowship project looking at Interactive and Experiential Design in Smart Textile Products and Applications (Communication-Wear). I developed concepts of clothing as tools for expressive communication using smart textile systems and communication technologies, which are used as research probes in user study work as a means to elicit preferences and priorities for this genre of clothing. Project contributors included HP Labs, and Vodafone, and project collaborators included Philippa Brock and Andrew Moore.

Little headway has been made in developing truly smart textiles. The development will necessitate cross-sectoral collaboration, which has huge implications for materials development processes and the cultures of the industries involved. Between 2004 and 2007 I coordinated the EPSRC network: Smart Textiles for Intelligent Consumer Products, a multi-disciplinary think-tank. It aimed to push-on smart textiles development by projecting the future of intelligent products through project identification workshops, and in so doing create formal channels of communication between the disparate sectors involved. These workshops explored experimental methods that are design-led, in order to facilitate across disciplines to promote shared understanding, and knowledge sharing and creation.

In 2005 I was co-investigator on, and principal author of, The Emotional Wardrobe EPSRC/AHRC Designing for the 21st Century research cluster. The Emotional Wardrobe was a multi-disciplinary group that included members from textile and fashion design (CSM), mobile communications (Vodafone Future Studies), computing (HP Labs, Equator IRC), informatics (University of Bradford), electronics and intelligent systems (Imperial College London). The central idea of The Emotional Wardrobe was to determine what the catalysts and drivers of future consumer wearable technology might be by synthesising current conventions and cultures of expressive and communicative capabilities of both fashion/clothing and mediated communications. The Emotional Wardrobe group experimented with design-led techniques that promoted a 'thinking through doing' approach as a valid form of investigation and understanding, and to address issues of multi-disciplinary collaboration. This group is currently preparing a larger follow-up project bid based on the insights and questions that the cluster year revealed; this will be put forward to EPSRC. Even though the funding period of the network has ended, the Network is still active and partners with various organisations to host events and workshops.