The role of human factors in surface design

Abstract

We live on an era of awareness where the uneducated end-user from the past, gives place to an informed and demanding consumer in the present, who seeks for a product that meets the ever-changing needs of his day-to-day life. If yesterday we were slaves to the dictatorship created by international fashion brands, today we seek to break free from the fashion cycle that enslaves us with its impositions of time and contemporaneity. The fashion system is failing. Fashion trends are weakened with the constant flow of information powered by the internet. Consumers can now define their personal styles, creating their own “micro-trends”. With this resurgence of clothes, concepts like uniqueness and quality will arise, reviving the cult of exclusive garments. Customization of fashion products emerges as a way to reinforce self-identity, allowing the end-user to control in a more intrinsic way the image he shares to the world. This article aims to identify the potentialities of customized surface design in the fashion industry, trying to understand the strategies to use in the management of human factors in user-based designs. This study is part of a Ph.D. investigation on the role of textile surfaces in fashion.