Futures Probing Workflow: A Digital Temporal Twin Methodology for Circular Fashion Design Reasoning

This project addresses a critical gap in fashion design education and practice arising from the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which shifts responsibility for environmental impact decisively toward the design phase. While designers are increasingly expected to account for durability, reuse, and circularity, current design tools and practices offer limited support for reasoning about how garments evolve over time, through use, wear, and environmental interaction. Research shows that such long-term, systemic reasoning places a significant cognitive burden on designers and exceeds what can be managed through present-oriented optimization tools alone.
The project proposes interactive, physics-informed simulations as epistemic - or thinking - tools that help externalize time, change, and uncertainty during the design process. Rather than predicting exact outcomes, these simulations enable playful, low-risk exploration of possible garment futures, making long-term consequences tangible, comparable, and discussable early in design. Grounded in theories of Distributed and Extended Cognition and informed by More-Than-Human perspectives, the research positions simulations as cognitive scaffolds that support systemic and temporal reasoning in circular design.
Methodologically, the project follows a Research through Design approach within an Educational Design Research framework, enriched by speculative design methods. Embedded in a 30-ECTS fashion design course and developed in collaboration with industry partners, the research iteratively designs, implements, and studies a simulation-based design workflow. Through observation, artefact analysis, and student reflection, the project investigates how simulations influence designers’ reasoning and circular design decisions. The outcome is a set of transferable educational and design principles that support thinking with time and uncertainty in fashion design, contributing to education, research, and professional practise.