Sustainability Strategy

The goal of WEAR Sustain is to develop best practices for enabling, facilitating and growing the European wearable technology, smart and electronic textiles network, toward collaborations and innovations between artists/designers and technologists who are working on ethical and sustainable solutions and technologies for a better future.

WEAR Sustain aims to pave the way by initiating the evolution of wearables that are more ethical, critical and aesthetic, and ultimately sustainable for future generations.

The WEAR Sustainability Strategy online platform will be available the end of December 2018, to enable future citizens, artists, designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and other industry stakeholders to be better informed on the ethics and sustainability issues, in order to stimulate the adoption of recommended best practices when making and using wearable technologies and smart/e-textiles, for the future of society and the planet.

Knowledge and insights will be gathered via

• The funded teams, by observing their design and development processes, methodologies and approaches used, as well as the challenges involved and the success stories in co-producing ethical and sustainable prototypes to be taken to market;
• Knowledge Exchange activities at WEAR Sustain events and webinars, to understand how to tackle ethics and sustainability issues head on and in the long-term;
• A network of sustainable advocacy hubs and experts connected through WEAR Sustain;
• The online WEAR Sustain Network; gathering input from an ecosystem of artists/designers, technologists, experts, mentors, hubs, service providers, and other industry players.

Sustainability Strategy Toolkit

All the knowledge and insights gleaned throughout the WEAR Sustain project will be synthesised in the form of specific strategies, training, resources and action required to facilitate the evolution of ethical and sustainable wearable technology, e-textiles and smart materials, to create successful partnerships and collaborations with the support of WEAR Sustain advocacy hubs, within the smart fashion, smart/e-textiles, technical fabrics, materials science, wearable and other electronics and engineering, and related/ dependent industries.

We will provide a toolkit of guidelines and best practices for design, circularity, and life-cycle product development for future research and implementation to support innovation, sourcing, development, manufacturing, waste management, ethical labour  and business practices, and interdisciplinary collaboration within technology sector and the creative industries, for more critical, aesthetic, ethical, sustainable wearable technology and smart/e-textiles, while addressing methods to safeguard data privacy or stop data collection altogether.

Join us in facilitating these important changes.

Visit our Media & Resources page to keep abreast of our research findings and deliverables, in our quest to develop next generation wearables which are aesthetic, ethical and critical.

Visit our glossary that maps out WEAR’s understanding of commonly used terms in and around “wearables”, and can be used as a reference for communication between stakeholders involved in WEAR.