Fashion design takes skill and practice: the process is rife with opportunities for mistakes. How does one design a pattern? What type of stitch should I use? What’s an inseam? How do buttons work? Every design is unique, and creative people who want to make their own clothing but don’t have experience have limited options. They can buy a sewing machine and learn how to pattern-make and sew. They can DIY and transform items they already own. Or they can go to a store or commission a custom piece, often expensive or unattainable. Until now. iFashion breaks down a complicated industry and allows anyone to design from their phone.
Overview:
iFashion allows users with little design experience to create their own dream pieces. The app provides access to consult with career fashion designers who will help ensure the feasibility of the piece, dealing with the specifics and structural details. All the user needs is inspiration. If there’s enough interest from other users, the piece could go into real production, facilitated by our marketplace of suppliers and manufacturers. Anyone can have an idea, but now, anyone can design.
How it Works:
1. Sign Up & Create Profile
The user creates a profile including their own measurements. If they’re designing for another person, they can add a profile with their dimensions as well. s
2. Design
The user picks a garment from our templates.
3. Customize
The user customizes the template to their liking. The user chooses the shape of the garment from many standard silhouettes. Everything can be modified, from large structures like the length to little embellished details. They then choose customizations like fastenings (zippers, buttons, ties, etc.) fabric, and color. They may embellish with decorative rips, cuffs, or waistbands. Like popular dress-up apps or creating a bitmoji, the user has complete control over what the product looks like, and they are able to easily select their options.
4. Perfect
The user may want the designs simply for themselves. If so, they can add their finished design to their own studio. But designers who want to create a tangible product have options. First, the app encourages a consultation with a professional designer, to help ensure proper design based on their knowledge and experience. They will adjust the design to remove potential flaws that prevent wearability and talk about budget and feasibility of materials. After this optional consultation, the user can publish their design to an online forum, where others can vote, comment, and give suggestions.
5. Group Fund
In the Collective Closet, the design forum, products with enough interest can move forward to real life production. The user can talk to suppliers about cost-reduction strategies like textile choice. If enough interest is present, suppliers and manufacturers will make the design and ship it to people’s doorsteps. A novice designer just created their own clothes!
Core Loop
Key Features
1. Smart Mannequin: Create Profiles to Customized Mannequin
2. Novice Friendly: Design with Built-in Templates and Prototypes
3. Progress Tracking: Minimal and Approachable Interface
4. Resources at Hand: Reach out to the Pros!
5. No Middleman: Textile Materials and Accessories Suppliers available to sell
Engagement with Design Principles
This app engages with many of the theorists our class has worked with throughout this semester. Our largest focuses were accessibility and simplicity.
Norman’s ideas: iFashion aligns with Norman’s ideas of Psychopleasure, Sociopleasure, and Ideopleasure. Through our community of designers and aspiring designers, users find sociopleasure through their interaction. Someone who wants to be a designer will feel like a designer when they use our app, embracing their values of creativity, highlighting ideopleasure. Finally, the positive result that comes from seeing one’s work manifested engage with psychopleasure. The user combines different aspects and customizations to create their own result. The app is simple, streamlined, and easy to use, making it easy to create the desired result, deriving psychopleasure.
Fogg’s Ideas: iFashion aligns with Fogg’s ideas of cognitive load. Users of iFashion already have the motivation to design, but they lack the ability. Our streamlined and easy-to-use function eliminates the roadblocks. Our app makes pursuing fashion design easy and accessible to anyone who has the ideas.
Cialdini’s Ideas: Cialdini’s theories of authority, and social proof are relevant here. By engaging with career fashion designers and professionals, the user understands their position of authority and will learn from them. For example, a user may be influenced to shorten or lengthen an aspect of their garment that they may not originally think to because an expert tells them that it will help the product. When users upvote others’ garments, social proof plays a role. It is likely that a garment upvoted by many will be upvoted by more, because people are influenced by others’ behaviors.
Inspiration: Furthermore, iFashion inspires via focusing on skills and awe. iFashion allows for the creation of designs and garments with minimal skills, but throughout the process of developing a garment, the user will interact with those with advanced technical skill. They can view and engage with creative excellent designs from other people, and they can be inspired through browsing through the collective closet.
App in use:
Links
Milanote: https://app.milanote.com/1JoJ2v17BQ5jae
Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wIk4KkK-tFL-jbeKc3J1MPBklcAB2zbcQ7rRiD0JZCk/edit#slide=id.p
