UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 08 DECEMBER 2021
Mina Flanagan, a second year student on our BA (Hons) Fashion Design course, recently participated in the international competition MODA-FAD.
The Sustainable Challenge, which forms part of Barcelona Design Week and Design Manchester, brings together a range of university students to explore a theme. Now in its third year, the theme for the 2021 challenge was Industrial Symbiosis: A Booster to Circular Fashion, and asked participants to present design ideas for closed-loop products or services for the fashion sector.
Students were asked to consider ideas in which the production of waste is eliminated by design. This means designing for durability, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling in order to keep products, components, and materials circulating within the economy.
Just 48 students, chosen from British, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian institutions, were invited to workshops with international student teams run from Manchester and Barcelona by Lizzie Cardwell and Verónica Kuchinow, beginning with two days of public talks from 8 experts during Barcelona Design week.
Mina’s multinational team was made up of two Spanish students from Barcelona and one Italian student. Together they presented a concept app called Tesseract, aimed at connecting consumers with industry through technology, to gain insight into brand approaches to sustainability. The app, designed to help the consumer make more informed purchasing choices, won praise from the judges.
Mina said "I really enjoyed taking part in it as it gave me a chance to get to know some new people with different skills as well as actively involving the idea of sustainability into our project."
Karen Nutton, a Lecturer on our Fashion Design course, commented: “Mina undertook the project at really short notice, and drew on her existing awareness of sustainability, and proved that going out of your comfort zone and taking a chance to do something new and challenging really does pay off.”