I think I really learn a different view to think about textiles such as learning different types of materials' features, increasing the knowledges about mixing different materials and techniques to increase the functions and purposes, adding technologies to help textile design developing functional textiles,and the most important thing, seriously thinking about how to extent textiles ' life and making a good cycle of them.
I think I am more into the area which is about sustainability. The environments has been ignored and polluted by human's desires for so long time. It is really urgent that green house effect has already fiercely and apparently effected everyone's life. There are some examples in nowadays.First at all, Venezia, one of the beautiful city which was built on the sea in Italy, is getting smaller and hard to live and is predicted to sink in the future by the rising sea level. In Beijing, due to the huge number of factories around this city, the serious air pollution problem has already harmed the residences life and the cityscapes. The foggy air is full of poisonous substances that makes people can't breath on the streets and blind their's eyes. Another recent example is the biggest typhoon ever in the world record. It took away more than thousand Filipinos' life and devastated more than three main cities in Philippine. Every buildings such as airport or main highways was destroyed by one night. It is definitely a really long way to recover everything and also testing people's limitation of ethics simultaneously. I would say that sustainability is so urgent that shouldn't only be emphasize in textiles design but also should be mentioned in every fields. Moreover, this idea should be implanted in every residents' head in the earth.
Back to textile design, in order to produce a big amount of textiles in a short time to and supply for huge need in this society, the most of the manufactories decide to use more toxic chemicals to shorten the whole process but contaminate the environments and probably waste some energies at the same time. There are main 6R 's in sustainable design to address this problems: repair, reuse, reduce, rethink, recycle, and refuse. In spite of there are some ways to solve the problems, I would say the most important part should be improved is how to design and produce them at the beginning and especially say no to toxic chemicals that probably can obviously decrease the harmful effects. In the other hand, if we completely refused chemicals, it would have some other problems such as most of the sustainable products with a high price, hardly supplying enough products for society and so on. Trying to balance the profits and environments is the first issue to attack. After producing, making a good cycle of every textiles and extending the life of them are definitely reduced the resources. There are some companies have dedicated the traditional methods to repair them and rebuild them and upcycle the value of them.
By the development of technology, we should more focus on the new biofibre. There are some new materials such as soya fibre or bamboo fibre. Although they provide a variety of sustainable possibilities for us to rethink about them, they are not ready to cope with the huge number of commercial requirement now.
In conclusion, though we are still struggling on this topic just as the people think about nuclear power, it is always a good start and we should learn how to respect and take care of our nature mother.
