Designing "fashion" into uniform for Taipei City public cleaner team

Abstract

There are nearly 7,000 street cleaners in Taipei city and their uniform is part of the city color; however, what they wear everyday for work is neither highly impressive nor fully functional. This workwear re-designing project is developed by adopting design thinking as a premise for the improvement of the uniform of Taipei's cleaner team to enhance the overall image and to improve the street cleaners' work efficiency and safety. The project requires involving multiple perspectives and conducting analyses of tremendous amount of data collected through discussions with the citizens from Adaptive City with topics ranging from sustainable environment and public issues to core social values. By integrating design thinking into this project, various perspectives can be introduced while more and more core design values can be verified. In a hope to make design an idea publically recognized and a value widely accepted as well as to highlight everyday aesthetics and quality city life, the study will create comfortable workwear with emblematic color combinations, adopting proper promoting strategies, applying innovative procedures, and eventually refreshing certain specific occupational image. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.