New Thinking: Fashion, AI and Sustainability
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2019
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Should we be renting our clothes instead of buying new ? Plus how robots are influencing the colour of our fashions. Mark Sumner and Stephen Westland both teach in the School of Design at the University of Leeds and they're involved in the Future Fashion Factory. This is a major government funded project working with industry and university research aiming to boost sustainability in fashion by using technology in new ways, looking at what we can do to change consumer and company attitudes to #fastfashion and the way neural networks can cut waste by accurately predicting what colours we really want to wear next season. Shahidha Bari hears from them and New Generation Thinker Jade Halbert from the University of Huddersfield describes her trip to a clothes recycling facility in Yorkshire.
Colourpedia project at Leeds https://www.colourpedia.org More information also at https://futurefashionfactory.org/
This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation. New Generation Thinkers is an annual scheme to showcase academic research in radio and podcasts. You can find more information on the Arts and Humanities Research Council website https://ahrc.ukri.org
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello, you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:34.9 | I'm Shah He-Dabari and this edition is part of our series called New Thinking, |
| 0:39.6 | which looks at the latest research emerging from UK universities. For this episode, you might like to |
| 0:45.2 | rifle through your wardrobe or better still peel off your jumper so you can squint at the label. |
| 0:50.9 | What are you wearing? Where were your clothes made? And why did you buy them? Those are good |
| 0:56.1 | questions to ask if you're interested in sustainability and the ecological impact of the fashion |
| 1:02.0 | industry, one of the most polluting industries in the world. Fast fashion in particular, |
| 1:07.0 | the mass consumption of low quality clothes has become a buy word for landfill. |
| 1:12.4 | But how do we start to understand what it is that drives consumers to buy so many clothes? |
| 1:17.8 | And how are academics harnessing artificial intelligence to help fashion become more eco-friendly? |
| 1:24.4 | Mark Sumner and Steve Westland both teach at the School of Design in the University of Leeds |
| 1:29.3 | and they're joining me from a rather noisy room in Leeds. Hello, Mark and Steve. |
| 1:33.9 | Hello, Mark, I know that your own research is on microfibers and that's something that's been |
| 1:39.1 | in the news recently. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? There's been a lot of discussion about |
| 1:45.0 | the sources of plastic and how those sources of plastic can have an impact on the environment. |
| 1:50.2 | And there is a suggestion that microfibers that are released from clothing during domestic laundry, |
| 1:57.1 | particularly, can be a significant source of ocean pollution and what's very |
| 2:03.4 | interesting about the microfiber discussion on plastic pollution is because of |
... |
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