Footnotes on Designers’ Perspectives: Climate-Centric Communication Design for Sustainable Fashion Consumption
Natalie R. Chiovitti
See it On Campus: Level 2
This text-based installation draws together two phases of my research that includes two installations: On the Mend and Footnotes*. The large-scale receipt and banners on clothing hangers represent my space for reflexivity. The typographic taglines and footnotes on the wall represent seven student designers’ and visual artists’ perspectives on sustainable fashion consumption, maintenance, and messaging that emerged through zine-making workshops.
Background, Aim, and Research Questions
The United Nations1 identify that within the next five years, the goal is for everyone globally to have information for everyday sustainable lifestyles. Communication designers are positioned to support this goal by creating cultural meanings, practices, experiences, and particular ways of living. As context to the need for climate-centric communication design* in the case of sustainable fashion consumption, the communication around the production of fashion is progressing toward sustainable practices, but does not sufficiently convey information on the materials used and the recycling process of fashion items leading to people choose convenience over varying degrees of sustainability. For example, approximately one garbage truck full of clothing is sent to the landfill globally every second. Locally, in Metro Vancouver, residents buy three times more clothes than they did in the 1980s and throw out “approximately 20,000 tonnes of textiles each year, which is equivalent to the weight of 44 T-shirts per person”.2 The enormity of this fashion consumption problem contributes to individuals feeling that sustainability is impossible to attain, along with feelings of consumption guilt, confusion, and misinformation that persists. In this problem space, designers can create a bridge to communicate these social and economic factors effectively. The aim of my project is to develop a climate-centric communication design practice within the case of sustainable fashion consumption. The research questions guiding this work are: What might a climate-centric communication design practice look like? How can climate-centric communication design facilitate everyday sustainable fashion consumption in Metro Vancouver?
* Climate-centric communication design is a communication design practice that embraces a reflective design process, and informed material and workflow choices toward environmental sustainability. This is facilitated by a back-and-forth movement between individual making and reaching out to the community for dialogue.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework used in this project is based on elements drawn from symbolic interactionism3, in which the meaning a person gives to something and to their interactions, is paramount. At the same time, meanings can change due to everyday life. Symbolic interactionism combined with elements drawn from pragmatist theory4 focuses on describing the aspects of everyday social life that have practical relevance to people and communication design. This serves as a basis for the critical documentation of my own reflexivity by acknowledging my perspective, experience, and biases to situate myself within the community of student designers in relation to zine-making workshops. Consistent with symbolic interactionism from a pragmatic perspective, I view designers, including myself, as active participants whose actions and interactions evolve and influence each other. Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT)5 informs and aligns with my view of climate-centric communication design as existing in a network of interactive relationships between actors such as designers, communities, nature, media technology, and designed artifacts. According to ANT, this means that human beings and objects simultaneously contribute to networks. For example, communication design activities and artifacts such as individual and community zine-making are conceptualized as having just as much agency as the person’s actual and desired everyday sustainable fashion consumption.
Design and Methods
These research questions are addressed using a Research through Design (RtD)6 approach. Guided by a critical documentation method7, the On the Mend series documents my own designer experience and reflexivity on sustainable fashion consumption through the mediums of an installation in gallery and pop-up settings along with an artist’s book. Further, two zine-making workshops8 were conducted at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) with seven student designers and visual artists using descriptive qualitative design with content analysis of participant data. Participants explored their individual and collective meanings of what climate-centric messaging and design could include based on their experiences of sustainable fashion consumption.
Findings
The identified overarching theme ‘footnotes on consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability’ describes how participants balance sustainable practices with convenience and other factors that compete with sustainability. Although a footnote is usually considered as extra and not part of the main conversation, in my research, the idea of a “footnote” is repurposed to be part of the main conversation on how can we live and not harm the planet. “Footnotes” describes how participants experience their successes with sustainability along with the exceptions to engaging in sustainable fashion consumption. The Footnotes* installation reflects participants’ own and collective meanings of ways of being and doing that are not always visible in everyday life or through commercial communication channels. The Footnotes* installation is a collective reading experience of multiple perspectives on sustainable fashion within the three categories of fashion consumption, maintenance, and messaging.
Implications
Communication design practices such as zine-making can assist designers in uncovering their own individual and community narratives to create a visual language to promote sustainable fashion consumption. A comparison of communication design mediums and settings are discussed in relation to how each contributes to a wider network by facilitating a consistent back-and-forth movement between individual making and community dialogue. In this post-digital era of the information age, where vast amounts of information, technology, and materials are available, the creative direction concepts of “on the mend” and “footnotes” together with the careful choices of messaging, medium, spaces, materials, and design aesthetics are key to the practice of climate-centric communication design. This work may assist designers with the conceptual and practical elements of communication design to navigate the interplay between environmental, economic, and social sustainability together with making sense of the dense information landscape within which designers are constantly moving and that surrounds us everyday.
In the following, my two research phases are presented in reverse chronological order in which I discuss phase 2: Zine-Making Workshops and Footnotes* Installation and then phase 1: On the Mend Series: Installations (Gallery and Pop-Up) & Artist’s Book.
Zine-Making Workshops and Footnotes* Installation
Zine-Making Workshops with Seven Student Designers and Visual Artists
Overview of Zine-Making Workshops: In the zine-making workshops, seven student designers and visual artists made zines and engaged in a group discussion. Zine-making, as a design practice, provides ways for designers to access their perspectives on sustainable fashion consumption, maintenance, and messaging based on interpretations of their actions and interactions with others and themselves (their inner dialogue). Through zine-making workshops, I move away from the common definition of a consumer as a person or thing that uses, purchases, or eats. Instead, participants are viewed as social actors that construct their own meanings within a network of interactive relationships, social interactions with others and their interpretations, and hands-on practice by reflexively moving back-and-forth between individual making and community dialogue. Within the zine-making process, designers create their own and collective meanings of what climate-centric communication design is or could be. Recalling Troy R. Lovata’s notion of zines as a tool for connecting individuals to communities9, the zines served as a visual medium for participants’ thoughts and feelings. In my zine-making workshops, some participants collaged with images and text from magazines, while other combined collaging with drawing or writing to remix and reframe commercial messaging and imagery to reflect their own perspectives in their zines about sustainable fashion consumption.
Development of “Footnotes” Creative Direction: Using qualitative summative content analysis, I identified one overarching theme; three categories, and 32 sub-categories each supported by direct quotations from the participants. The overarching theme across all participants is captured by the idea of “footnotes on consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability” which describes how student designers’ balance their successes within sustainability along with the exceptions to engaging in sustainable fashion. Various perspectives across a spectrum emerged in maintaining and consuming fashion items as well as the messaging around fashion and climate crisis. Based on the content analysis, the idea of “footnotes” became my creative direction for the installation. Typically, a “footnote” is “a note of reference, explanation, or comment usually placed below the text on a printed page”10 when further information is needed. It is in this way that the idea of footnotes is well suited to conveying the pattern that I noticed during the data analysis in relation to how participants balance convenience and other factors that compete with their sustainable fashion practices in varying degrees.
Participants making zines in workshop #1 and workshop #2
Installation: Footnotes* on consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability
Based on qualitative summative content analysis of my zine-making workshops with seven student designers and visual artists, I use the finding of “footnotes on consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability” as a creative direction to express their diverse lived experiences through my Footnotes* installation. Footnotes* is a text-based installation that is comprised of typography inkjet-printed on 384 sheets of 100% recycled paper that is wheat pasted and tiled onto a wall, measuring 10 x 40 feet.
In this installation, I use a large-scale structure of footnotes to communicate the participant’s diverse experiences of successes and exceptions to engaging in sustainable fashion consumption which is at the centre of the timely contemporary conversation about how can we live without harming the planet.
Natalie R. Chiovitti, Footnotes* on consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability, 2025, 40 x 10 ft., typography inkjet-printed on 384 sheets of 100% recycled paper wheat pasted onto a wall.
“Talking Wall” and Typography: An aim of the Footnotes* installation is to make sense of the dense information landscape, physical and digital, that surrounds us everyday through the language of communication design in a collective reading experience or a “talking wall”11 to reframe current design and messaging practices. The typography serves as a visual manifestation of the student designers’ language that expresses their tone, energy, and thought process during the zine-making workshops. Student designers’ perspectives are conveyed in a non-linear way through the use of typography that mimic the flow and rhythm of talking. The talking is displayed visually to bring to life student designer descriptions of the individual zines. As with Roland Barthes, I view text as a network of information that is comprised of “references, echoes, and language”12 in which I deliberately use the navigational feature of taglines and footnotes found in publications and advertising. Each tagline is a direct quotation from the participants that captures the essence of their experience and is further described through its corresponding footnote. The structure of a footnote provides an entrance and exit from the one-way stream of discourse in the taglines such as “Am I doing this for myself, or am I actually doing it for the planet?” Aligned with Donald Schön (1983), I strove to communicate multiple perspectives by bringing forward nuances through “…artistry [that] is evident in [my] selective management of large amounts of information [using the structure of taglines and footnotes]…to hold several ways of looking at things without disrupting the flow of inquiry.”13
“Footnotes” Creative Direction: Although a footnote is usually considered as extra and not part of the main conversation, in my research, the idea of a “footnote” is repurposed to be part of the main conversation. My creative direction of “footnotes” is a way to modify, refine, and repurpose practices within current systems to allow a plurality or spectrum of viewpoints as part of the main messaging. This is consistent with Matthew Wizinsky’s view that “direct engagement with designing or redesigning…is an ‘experience’ to be designed by the…designer”.14 In the process of this designing and redesigning, the main finding and creative direction of “footnotes” creates a space for reframing broad messaging from systems by honouring diverse lived experiences of student designers and visual artists through their direct quotations communicated typographically as seven taglines and corresponding footnotes (see Table 1). In this way, the creative direction of “footnotes” is proposed as a tactic to help navigate and raise awareness around sustainable fashion consumption within the strategies of overarching systems, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, CNCA, and Metro Vancouver’s Repair Re-wear campaign (previously known as Think Thrice). This is in line with Michel de Certeau’s concept of “tactics” and “strategies”15, in which people are viewed as actively repurposing daily life through their everyday practices (tactic) within the constraints of overarching current systems (strategy).
Alternating between consumption choices: repair, reuse, repurpose by self or others, and systemic change beyond individual change are some take-aways within the three categories of consumption, maintenance, and messaging around sustainable fashion for climate-centric communication designers, and led to the overarching creative direction of “footnotes” (see Table 1).
Table 1. Takeaways for climate-centric communication designers based on taglines and footnotes within the three categories of consumption, maintenance, and messaging in sustainable fashion
Overview of Climate-Centric Communication Design Process of Footnotes* Installation
Emerging Narratives participatory activity where attendees were invited to put a dot sticker beside any participants’ quotes that resonated with their experience by writing it on a sticky note. This activity was conducted in the early phases of the qualitative summative content analysis of the transcripts and served as a tool to gauge how well the participants’ experiences and perspectives resonated with the general public at my ECU Open Studio.
Footnotes* installation: Small-scale iteration #1
View1: Installation set-up of wheat pasting 384 sheets of paper on to the Knee Gallery wall over 24 hours (2 days)
InDesign file (top) with wall A and wall B set-up. Note: Set-up as facing pages at 5x reduced scale of actual installation; Wall A Illustrator file (bottom) with 276 art boards that represent sheets; and Wall B Illustrator file with 108 art boards that represent sheets
View 2: Installation set-up of wheat pasting 384 sheets of paper on to the Knee Gallery wall over 24 hours (2 days)
On the Mend Series: Installations (Gallery and Pop-Up) & Artist’s Book
Reflexivity and “On the Mend” Creative Direction Development: Reuse, Repurpose, Repair Project
Before reaching out to a community of student designers and visual artists through zine-making workshops which led to the Footnotes* installation (discussed above), my reflexivity started by actively engaging in the sustainable practices of reuse, repurpose, and repair, to situate myself within the topic. As a way to guide my aesthetics and rationale for design choices, I took inspiration from Modern and Contemporary artworks. First, I participated in reusing what I already have such as an old pair of sneakers that I liked and could not bring myself to throw away. I made patches that I drew and embroidered and added them to my sneakers. As a result of this I continued to wear them. My patches were inspired by May Morris’ Panel from 1890, which is an embroidered piece of linen with an exposed pattern drawing. Second, I obtained a shirt at a clothing swap at school but it did not fit well so I asked myself what can I do with this? I repurposed the shirt into a tote bag which was inspired by Su Richardson’s Hot Flush Handbag from 2021. Third, I repaired one of my favourite cardigans that holds a lot of memories with family and friends. The cardigan had a hole in it. So I used a darning technique to mended it and repaired the hole. I was inspired by the mending works of Celia Pym, especially her work Elizabeth’s Cardigan, and that was an on-going series from 2002-2016.
Development of “On the Mend” Creative Direction: From this, I developed the creative direction of ‘On the Mend’ based on the expression that is associated with “improving health or recovery, such as a person or an economy being on the mend”. This led me to expand it to the environment being on the mend through mindful consumption and maintenance of fashion items. This creative direction was carried through to my installation and artist’s book. Further, this creative direction is consistent with Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham call for a paradigm shift to an “Earth Logic”16 view that prioritizes environmental sustainability by holistically following the planet’s limits and capacity.
On the Mend Installation–Elbow Gallery and a cafeteria pop-up at ECU
The aim of my On the Mend installation in the Elbow Gallery and the pop-up in the ECU cafeteria, was to empower people and invite community dialogue by showing examples of the three fashion items I reused, repurposed, and repaired alongside a large-scale receipt and participation table with mending materials and tools. Each setting of the installation invited a different array of social engagement possibilities. For example, the Elbow Gallery setting offered a space for focused attention on the installation itself afforded by the gallery’s blank white walls. Some people shared their experiences through the online Padlet board which further enhanced community sharing. Whereas, through the site-specificity of the cafeteria pop-up, the meaning of the On the Mend installation was strengthened and recontextualized because the space looks onto the North Shore mountains and in-progress SkyTrain station through the windows. Further, there is an existing wall mural called We are Stories âcathônkîwina by Cree artist Caleb Elison along with furniture for people to gather. It is in this way, that the pop-up site offered new relationships between people, natural environment, urban environment, and communication design. This is consistent with Julia B. Corbett’s analysis of social actors17 which provides insight into how designers can create a bridge through messaging to express these social and economic factors effectively.
Natalie R. Chiovitti On the Mend, 2024 Gallery installation design including a large-scale receipt, banners on clothing hangers, seamstress mannequin, cardigan, tote bag, sneakers, ottoman, sewing materials and tools, online Padlet conversation board, & pamphlet, approx. 9 x 19 ft., Elbow Gallery at ECU.
Natalie R. Chiovitti, Pop-Up of On the Mend, 2024, op-up installation including a large-scale receipt, banners on clothing hangers, seamstress mannequin, cardigan, tote bag, sneakers, ottoman, sewing materials and tools, online Padlet conversation board, pamphlet and Gently Used zine, approx. 9 x 19 ft., cafeteria at ECU.
Left to right: Visitor reading a copy of Gently Used zine at the On the Mend pop-up installation; Visitor sewing a piece of linen in an embroidery hoop at the On the Mend pop-up installation
As shown in Table 2, an artifact of a receipt was used to reframe fashion consumption towards sustainability through the use of climate-centric messaging that includes typography and design considerations.
Table 2. Typography and design considerations for facilitating climate-centric messaging: On the Mend receipt within artist’s book, gallery and pop-up installations
Artist’s Book–On the Mend: A Designer’s Experience of Sustainable Fashion Practices
The On the Mend installations were documented, collected, and expanded upon in an artist’s book about my experience and is titled On the Mend: A Designer’s Experience of Sustainable Fashion Practices. Taking a cue from 1960s conceptual artists who used artist’s magazines and publications as a way to exhibit their work, I used the artist’s book as an “alternative space”18 for the installation to exist in. In this way, I think about the book as an object and as a space for the installation to happen beyond the temporal limits of the physical installations. For example, the receipt element continues in the artist’s book as a fold-out page.
Natalie R. Chiovitti, On the Mend: A Designer’s Experience of Sustainable Fashion Practices, 2024, 8.5 x 5.5 in., hand-bound publication with laser-etching and colour laser printing on recycled paper
Flip-through video of On the Mend Artist’s Book
The making of the On the Mend artist’s book consisted of: Six iterations of the editorial design layout; three rounds of content edits; nine prototypes/tests of binding and printing; and, fourteen laser etching tests for the cover. During the process I focused on design through texture, paper choices, and typography (see Table 3).
Table 3. On the Mend artist’s book: Design through texture, paper choices, and typography
Artist’s Book Sharing at the Vancouver Art Book Fair: Engaging With Community
I shared my artist’s book at the Vancouver Art Book Fair (VABF) in July 2024. I participated in the art book fair as part of the Wednesday Afternoon Press, an imprint of a publication design course that I audited during the Summer of 2024. I engaged in conversations with the community in Metro Vancouver, the international exhibitors, and attendees. My artist’s book served as an entry point to conversation into people’s own experiences of sustainable fashion consumption and their interest in communication design.
Concluding Thoughts and Reflections
My key reflections and understandings throughout my work on the On the Mend series, zine-making workshops, and Footnotes* installation are based on my reflexivity within the back-and-forth movement between individual and community design practices. This encompasses the interplay between individual making and reaching out to the community for dialogue. This back-and-forth cycle was repeated with each phase of this research. Through this research I developed a climate-centric communication design practice that focuses on the role of design in the case of sustainable fashion consumption. I elicited rich descriptions from participants that led to the identification of the overarching theme “footnotes on consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability”. This theme describes how participants experience their successes with sustainability along with the exceptions to engaging in sustainable fashion consumption.
My gallery and pop-up installations, artist’s book, and zine-making workshops contribute to a wider network of relationships by facilitating a constant back-and-forth movement between individual making and reaching out to the community for dialogue. Based on this, I was able to optimize each medium for its possibility to facilitate individual and community interactions including creating alternative spaces for installations and experiences to be shared beyond the ephemeral and temporal nature of these. This may be beneficial to other communication designers. Zine-making as a research method can assist communication designers to uncover their own individual and community narratives (social capital) to create a visual language that facilitates conversation and practices. As part of the main messaging within the case of sustainable fashion consumption, my repurposing of the idea of “footnotes” paved the way for me to develop the tactic of using typography and site-specific space to create an experience for communicating diverse lived experiences of student designers and visual artists. The concept of “footnotes” could be a valuable tool for communication designers when trying to highlight perspectives and blurring within a topic and its multiple messages. In this way, the creative direction of “footnotes” as a tactic may help communication designers bring to the forefront diverse lived experiences of their audiences.
In this post-digital era of the information age, where vast amounts of information, technology, and materials are available, the creative direction concepts of “on the mend” and “footnotes” together with the careful choices of messaging, medium, spaces, materials, and design aesthetics are key to the practice of climate-centric communication design. It is my hope that this research will facilitate continued dialogue and assist designers with the conceptual and practical elements of communication design needed to navigate environmental, economic, and social sustainability.
Abbreviated Bibliography and Notes
1. United Nations, “Target 12.8 of Goal 12 Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns,” last modified July 10, 2023.
2. Baneet Braich, “Textile Waste is a Growing Problem — And Canada Still Isn’t Doing Enough to Solve it, Experts Say,” CBC News, February 28, 2022.
3. Herbert Blumer, “The methodological position of symbolic interactionism,” in Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method (California: University of California Press, 1969)
4. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Dover Publications, 1925).
5. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
6. Christopher Frayling, “Research in art and design,” Royal College of Art Research Papers series 1, no. 1 (1993): 1-5
7. Zoë Sadokierski, “Developing Critical Documentation Practices for Design Researchers,” Design Studies 69, no. 1 (2020): 1-33.
8. Teal Triggs, Fanzines: The DIY Revolution (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010), 7; Ash Watson, “Zine Making as a Method,” Breaking Methods Webinar Series, July 16, 2020, video, 20:52; Troy R. Lovata, “Zines: Individual to Community,” in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspective, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, ed. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole (Toronto: Sage Publications, 2008), 323, 329-331.
9. Troy R. Lovata, “Zines: Individual to Community,” in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspective, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, ed. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole (Toronto: Sage Publications, 2008), 323, 329-331.
10. “Footnote,” Merriam Webster Dictionary, n.d.
11. Dr. Maite García Sanchis (Adjunct Professor, Politecnico di Milano) described the Footnotes* installation as a “talking wall” while visiting ECU on February 21, 2025.
12. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image/Music/Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 155-64.
13. Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 130.
14. Matthew Wizinsky, “Design After Capitalism, in Practice,” in Design After Capitalism: Transforming Design Today for an Equitable Tomorrow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), 246.
15. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 35-38. Note: de Certeau’s strategies are used by pre-existing systems to manage and organize space, while tactics are the ways individuals navigate and repurpose that space to reframe the strategies.
16. Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan (London: The J J Charitable Trust, 2019).
17. Julia B. Corbett, “Individuals as Social Actors, Not Consumers,” in Communicating the Climate Crisis: New Directions for Facing What Lies Ahead, ed. C. Vail Fletcher (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021), 56.
18. Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 1-25.
