Possible future ~ Living Garments

The whole week was about the Future Mindsets. These days the world around us is changing surprisingly fast. Every day brings something new and unexpected that shifts the way we live or think. During this week we were analyzing what are the mindsets of people right now and speculating about the future ones, discussing how Covid has affected society.

The most repeated question was:

“How will the new-normal look like?”

But right away the second one was appearing:

“How did our old-normal look like?”

Our first step was to Coolhunt on the streets of Barcelona and search in social media to find signals and patterns around us. At the beginning we were overwhelmed by the amount of information and lack of time that we had to gather them, but we just decided to trust the process and follow the path. We were using Miro to share our findings and later to organize them. After clustering and analyzing all information, we created opportunities and insights. This allowed us to discover trends and map them on the timeline. This was one step away from creating present, future scenarios and describing future mindsets.

Our possible future ~ Living Garments FUNGex

In our future scenario, clothes as we know will no longer exist and with the use of technology humanity will find symbiotic relationships with fungi or algae exo-skeleton. These garments will have a climate positive output. What is more, they will include Smart Tech: an exo-skeleton owner will be able to communicate with their garments via bio signals such as hormones or electrical signals to communicate growth, adjustment in texture and color.

There will be different possible garments properties depending on the need: waterproof, UV Protection, heat absorption, moister retain, etc.

The garment won’t need to be watered, because FUNGex as it is feeding from the humidity in the air and body of the owner. It can be cultivated and composted after it's life cycle ends, saving money and the planet.

This is how the Future MindSets focused on retail industry will look like:

A shift in the sustainable focus, as many textiles will be made from living, plant-based materials. People will not think about sustainable clothes, because they will be alive.
The young empowered generations will redefine the standards by speaking up and changing consumption behaviours.
People will focus on using technology to communicate better with nature and create symbiotic relations with bio signal communication via smart devices to fix the textile industry's complex layer of failure.

As a deliverable of TrendsLab week we have created a short video that shows our process described above. Enjoy!