Design Anthropology → Doing clothing
Thrift+, a second-hand e-commerce platform, wanted to know more about second-hand shoppers. They were particularly interested in how they could cater better to older Millennials and Gen X who often seem to fade out of view next to the much loved Gen Z Depop girlies.
Complex cognitive and emotional processes emerged as a part of the shopping experience, which could hardly be delineated into ‘an experience’ at all, but rather materialised as an ongoing imaginatory practice - a way of ‘doing’ clothing.
We developed the below framework for Doing Clothing, and used it to map out how different kinds of shoppers prioritised different aspects of this imaginatory work at different times.
In addition to a design ethnography, a card game was created to bring this imaginatory work to life; an easy way of seeing how the same piece of clothing requires different imaginatory work depending on internal and external factors.
Fieldwork took place across multiple sites, and interviews were conducted with shoppers and sellers that had varying stregths of relationships to second-hand clothing.
Team members; Marie S. Lindberg, Freya Clarke, Zhimei Ji, Ruoxi Liu, Xiaoying Ma.