Open research practice
Fashion Fictions: Understanding Sustainable Worlds
Research theme(s): Safety and Sustainability
School: School of Art & Design
Overview
The most obvious impact of the Open Research practices adopted in this project is the overwhelming response from participants: over 4,500 people have taken part in more than 100 activities spanning six continents over the last four years.
- Amy Twigger Holroyd
Tell us a bit about you and your research.
My name is Amy Twigger Holroyd and I am Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham School of Art & Design. Through design-led participatory research, I explore plural possibilities for post-growth fashion systems: alternative ways of living with our clothes that meet our fundamental human needs and respect ecological limits. My book Fashion Fictions: imagining Sustainable Worlds will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. I am also author of Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes (I.B. Tauris, 2017) and Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion (Bloomsbury, 2023). I was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts in 2024.
Tell us about a project you were involved in which used Open Research practices and principles?
I run a project called Fashion Fictions, which brings people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems. It responds to the many environmental and social problems associated with the mainstream fashion system, particularly in the Global North .
A huge reduction in resource use will be needed if we are to develop fashion systems that work within ecological limits. Such systems will involve different social, cultural, and economic norms – but we lack compelling visions of how our fashion systems might be transformed, and struggle with a status quo that can feel deeply entrenched.
The ‘Fashion Fictions: Understanding Sustainable World’ project creates a safe space to explore what alternative fashion systems might look like. It aims to build a more varied collective vocabulary of ways that we might live with our clothes and create an expanded sense of possibility, while generating new knowledge about the process and outcomes of collective imagination in the field of sustainable fashion.
Describe the open research practice(s) employed in your study. Why did you select them?
A central element of the project is an open invitation for people to contribute their own visions of fictional parallel worlds. They can write short written outlines, create visual or material prototypes and even bring worlds to life through embodied enactments. These are submitted for publication on the website via an online form. Contributors give consent for their material to be published on the openly accessible project website with a Creative Commons licence which allows others to build on their work. The website also houses various resources that I have created to enable people to run their own Fashion Fictions workshops; all of these have Creative Commons licences to facilitate use and adaptation.
Data generated via Fashion Fictions research activities is being made available to others via Zenodo. To date I have published small datasets relating to a study of Fashion Fictions in education settings (interview transcripts, with access restricted to bona fide researchers) and an analysis of written fictional contributions (which is openly accessible, as there is no personal data involved). I am preparing a much larger dataset including material generated in a series of participatory workshops, which again will be restricted access to ensure the material is used only for academic research. I am also publishing open access outputs, including a forthcoming monograph published by Bloomsbury, supported by funding from UKRI .
Did you face any challenges in the project, and how did you overcome them?
Overall, I didn’t encounter many challenges, perhaps because my work has been guided by principles of openness and participation for a long time – first as a designer, and then as a design researcher. For me, key considerations include establishing effective processes to manage participation and ensuring that there is a clear and robust approach to securing informed consent from participants. I provide clear information about how their data will be stored, used and shared and ensure that each person confirms their understanding before they share any information or creative material. With hundreds of contributors, I use spreadsheets to keep records of who has contributed what, when, and what their preferences are, for example in terms of being identified and anonymised and being notified about any contributions that build on their work. It can be difficult to engage participants from diverse demographic backgrounds, and this is something that I continue to work on by collaborating with partners in different settings.
At the outset of the project I wondered whether there might be resistance to the requirement for contributors to apply a Creative Commons licence to their material, given the importance of intellectual property in art and design. I chose to use a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence, which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the author and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence, because it keeps the principle of open sharing going with every adaptation. I haven’t experienced any issues with this at all; in fact, participants seem really positive about this strategy. They enjoy the process of building on others’ work and the sense of solidarity and connection this can create.
What has been the impact of adopting open research practice(s)in your project?
The most obvious impact of the open research practices adopted in this project is the overwhelming response from participants: over 4,500 people have taken part in more than 100 activities spanning six continents over the last four years. Many of these activities take place in education contexts, primarily in universities, while others take place in school, community, and industry contexts.
This participation enriches the project immeasurably by drawing in diverse perspectives. The activities generate new creative outputs and new case studies that demonstrate different ways in which Fashion Fictions can be adapted to suit different settings. This material in turn inspires further engagement and participation. It also, of course, provides valuable data that informs my research. The research is undoubtedly more inclusive, accessible, and reliable than it was conducted in a less open format – in fact, the project as a whole couldn’t exist without the openness it is built upon.
What did you learn from making this project ‘open’? Do you have any advice for others considering adopting open research practices?
I have learned (again) that people are great! They are up for getting involved in research, up for exploring different ways of thinking and practising, and up for engaging with playful imagination, even if they don’t quite know where it’s going to lead. They come up with wonderfully varied visions – much more radical and forward-looking than those that dominate conventional sustainable fashion discourse. I feel privileged to be the custodian of these positive and creative visions, and feel it is important to make them as widely available as possible.
My advice for others would be to build the principle of openness into the core of a project so it runs throughout, rather than being a bolt-on addition. That makes it much easier to develop a coherent and consistent approach when the project evolves and develops.
What are you working on now?
Since the Open Research Awards, Dr Sally Cooke (Research Fellow) and I have completed a project working with six local primary schools and two local arts organisations on Fashion Fictions, which was capturing in a short film. It’s been a great experience adapting the creative speculation processes for children and has led to the publication of an open-access resource pack that can be used by teachers and facilitators to run their own Fashion Fictions activities inside or outside school settings.
If you are interested in learning more about what I am working on you can visit my personal website, LinkedIn profile profile, or check out my ORCID.
Publications
Fashion Fictions project website
NTU Open Research Award Winner
This is an NTU Open Research Award Winning Project. In 2024, NTU launched the Open Research Awards to celebrate Open Research practice at NTU. The awards were designed to recognise any member of NTU staff – academic, technical, professional services, or postgraduate researchers – who demonstrated a commitment to using open research practices in their work.