Fast fashion - Fast content

The supply chain of the design industry and its impact on the environment.

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Introduction by Marzia Aricò

This guest column emerges from a conversation I had with Fabiola Nardecchia the first time I met her at Media Monks in Amsterdam, where she is currently Head of UX. I absolutely loved her reflections comparing fast fashion to fast content and design. So, I asked her to crystallise her thoughts in a blog post for Design Mavericks. If you are interested in hearing more from Fabiola, I have also interviewed her for an episode of Design Voices Elevated, Season Two.

Before we start, please consider subscribing to Design Mavericks. It is one of the best ways to support my work and become part of the community.

Fast fashion - Fast content by Fabiola Nardecchia

When writing this article, I am a designer wearing trousers from Mango, a Uniqlo shirt I bought on Vinted, and a pair of Reebok from Zalando. The only thing coming from a store is my white supermarket socks, which are too basic for a package and a ride on a truck. Most items in my closet come from a website, although most of them are secondhand. 

I cannot stop thinking about what I should do with myself in this: a designer writing an article about the parallelism between fast fashion and fast content, wearing fast fashion, and designing fast content.

The problem with being a UX or a Service Designer is that it soon becomes a mindset, a way to see things, and pretty often a frictional way to experience life. So every time I scroll for inspiration and end up buying something online, I feel I’ve fallen into a web made by a fellow spider- a web designer indeed- to capture my “user” attention. It is quite a peculiar experience to be both a user and a designer or, better, a designer and a consumer of designs, like we - the professionals - are. Like being a cook, out for dinner: can you enjoy the meal?

Although I feel the consumer/designer requires another article, I am not here wearing the Mango trousers, the Uniqlo shirt, the Zalando shoes and the supermarket socks to talk about my addiction to Vinted but to zoom out and compare my consumer behaviour with fashion and my professional attitude with design.

The red thread I want to expose is not the user experience that locks us in and feeds the platforms. It’s not even a “red thread” but a lens that focuses on the way we overconsume goods. Bear with me.

As consumers, we are more and more critically conscious of the impact of fast fashion, we are familiar with the waste it produces, with the exploitation of resources and people, and we are aware of the short lifespan embedded in its DNA. If we could apply the same critical approach in the way we consume digital experiences, would the comparison stand and spark the same criticism and resolutions?

I believe the way we consume digital experiences has a lot in common with the way we consume the fashion industry. Both of them consume resources, and they consume us.

As a non-expert (but yet a sympathizer) in sustainability, I loosely identified a few themes to compare fast fashion and what I’d call in this article “fast content.” Consider that my thinking sparks from the latter, my field of expertise, not vice versa, but I’ll keep fashion at the centre for familiarity with a broader audience.

The 3 topics I identified are not exhaustive, but they include:

1. Lifespan of goods

2. Exploitation of resources and environment

3. Labor and de-localization

Before entering the gist of the discussion, let me clarify what I mean by “fast content”.

(Fast) content for me is the aggregation - and, it goes without saying, the simplification - of “digital experiences”, given that the digital experiences live on top and deliver content in a “fast” way. I could have called it “fast fashion vs fast digital experiences”, but let’s be honest: it doesn’t sound as good as “fast fashion vs fast content”. I'm not sure we can have “slow digital experiences” without negatively connotating them, but let’s pledge to align on this definition until the end of this article.

The analogies are easy to see, from the exploitation of earth resources to the use of offshore labour, from the lifespan of experiences made to last from a few seconds to a few months, to their environmental and cultural impact. However, we are still quite short-sighted when it’s time to point at them.

Lifespan of Goods

Fast fashion is designed beyond seasonality, moving from seasons to TikTok microtrends.

The release of new collections of fast fashion is 25 times faster than traditional fashion¹

Instead of launching new styles twice a year in the traditional spring/summer and winter/fall seasons, fast fashion companies have 52 micro-seasons²

Not having seasonality and having so many clothing items at such cheap prices leads to overconsumption and a lesser value of the item itself (arguably sometimes called “girl math”³). Would you care that your t-shirt is loosening up if you paid only 10 bucks for it? You’re more likely to buy a new clothing item in 2 weeks if you didn’t “invest” in your previous purchases, and that keeps the wheel spinning while the lifecycle of your items is reduced.

Digital experiences are going beyond “seasons,” too. From Black Fridays and back-to-school to micro trends on socials and product drops, the occasions to build and improve user experiences have multiplied over the years. It doesn’t matter if you’re in product or consultancy; the push is always to create new, more engaging experiences, improve the metrics, and convert more.

If the lifespan of a fast fashion item is around 35 wears, what is the lifespan of our interactions?⁴ As with clothes, it depends.

So, the digital experiences we create have similarities with the lifespan of fast fashion purchases: they can last from the few seconds of a social interaction to days of a campaign to weeks of a platform, but only until the next iteration, the next launch, or the next refresh of the UI.

Obviously, it mainly depends on your relationship with that content, your goal, and your priorities. But as with fast fashion, we keep on producing so that the consumer can consume.

Our KPIs are less based on meeting user needs and more based on creating returns for the businesses. Let’s add features, let’s raise the engagement, let’s produce more pixels designers can push for people to click⁵.

“Invest in long-lasting clothes items”, they say, but If time is the currency of the digital experiences, how much and where do we “transaction” vs “invest” our time?

Exploitation of Resources and Environment

Because our interactions are digital and intangible, we tend not to think about their impact on the resources we consume: resources, materials, and energy.

We tend to think about an experience as a single touchpoint, not much as the last link of a long supply chain that starts from hardware and ends with software.

To create a garment, we depend on a process that can supply materials like cotton and rely on earth resources like water, while for digital, we are using rare earths to build our phones and coal energy to turn on pixels.

The textile and fashion industry has a long and complex supply chain, starting from agriculture and petrochemical production (for fiber production) to manufacturing, logistics and retail.

Each production step has an environmental impact due to water, material, chemical and energy use.⁶

For a designer, it is an easy exercise to swap some of these words with Tech Industry, extraction of minerals, hardware production, digital production, development and maintenance.

The long supply chain of fast fashion has many links in common with the long supply chain of digital tech. And yes, each production step has an environmental impact due to water, material, chemical and energy use. 

Hardware is the gateway of digital experiences, enabling virtual worlds, platforms, and apps to run and perform. The more engaging and immersive the experience is, the more technologically advanced has to be the tool that allows that computational power.

To produce one kg of cotton we need 20,000 liters of water, to produce a microchip takes approximately 2,200 gallons of Ultra-Pure Water (UPW), and running GPT-3 inference for 10-50 queries consumes 500 milliliters of water, depending on when and where the model is hosted.⁷

Since we design everything on another piece of software, like Figma, we end up in a game of mirrors, where the chain becomes heavier not only from the software we produce but also from the software that supplies the production of the design.

The carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them accounts for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions, according to some estimates. It is similar to the amount produced by the airline industry globally, explains Mike Hazas, a researcher at Lancaster University. And these emissions are predicted to double by 2025.⁸

For the designers that are still reading this, it’s going to be easy to think about all the implications of the design-supply-chain just thinking about their day-to-day life, their project timeline and deliverables, the next scrums to attend, and the next flight to take.

The last point I want to make for this section is about what comes after consumption: the recycling bins, the vintage stores, and the landfills full of never-used garments. The missing link between fast fashion and fast content is indeed when experiences are turned off and discarded. This could be what is saving its face while slapping the planet.

I believe that part of our indignation for fast fashion is a reaction to the images of hundreds of thousands of garments being disposed of, filling landfills with no more use if not incineration.

One garbage truck of clothes is burned or sent to landfills every second! The average consumer bought 60 percent more clothes in 2014 than in 2000, but kept each garment for half as long.⁹

Digital experiences, instead, disappear when we don’t need them, they cease to exist, or they keep on existing in a vacuum,  a forgotten URL¹⁰. When we make URLs inactive, we are not cleaning up the impact they had; instead, they still keep polluting with broken links, dead pages, etc.

Where does a campaign go when we’re back to school? Is it worth consuming so many resources for an experience that lasts a few months, a few days, or a few minutes? 

Labour

Labour is a hot topic, too hot to touch it without getting burned on both sides.

Fast-fashion labour evokes noisy factories and exploitation; it is often the price somebody else pays for our lifestyle. 

Perhaps labour is the most difficult comparison for me. A UX designer is not sitting in a factory, instead they get paid good money to strategize interactions. Like other designers in fast fashion, we are on the privileged side of the supply chain: the “creative” one rather than the one who “creates.”

A fellow designer and a friend of mine, Francesco Pini, coined the term “button factory¹¹,” trying to capture the weird situation we work in, designing interactions at a “fast pace.” I, instead, would like to point my attention to the “limes” (Latin for “limits” - “nearby a boundary”), the less privileged situations that feed the fast content: de-localisation, content farms and socials.

If engagement is the goal and content is the means, then content must be produced somewhere.

In companies and agencies, content is “crafted” rather than just created. We design screens, tailoring the best possible user experience, but like in fast fashion, our designs go straight into mass production.

As in fast fashion¹², there are occasions when companies delegate parts of the supply chain, like software development, QA, asset creation, and customer assistance, to teams working in different countries where those practices are less expensive. This creates a post-colonial dynamic in which the thinking happens in the first world, and the execution happens in the cheapest time zone. 

India, a country where Western companies tend to outsource their technical needs, has an average yearly salary of $7,725. Developers in Eastern European countries can expect a significantly lower salary than their Western colleagues. In Poland a developer will typically make $22,740, and in Ukraine, the average is $22,348¹³.

Similarly, European freelance designers are now competing with other freelancers in countries where lower rates represent a good deal for most companies. De-localisation, in this sense, is becoming a class struggle. Content farms employ freelance writers to produce “just good enough” content to be published, clicked and consumed for advertising revenues. You might be thinking content farms are of no interest to designers, but the focus should be on the dynamics they introduce in terms of exploitation more than a not-my-backyard approach. Here exploitation also meets pollution:

Information consumers end up with less relevant or valuable resources. Producers of relevant resources receive less cash as a reward (lower clickthrough rate) while producers of junk receive more cash. One way to describe this is pollution. Virtual junk pollutes the Web environment by adding noise. Everybody but the polluters pays a price for Web pollution: search engines work less well, users waste precious time and attention on junk sites, and honest publishers lose income. The polluter spoils the Web environment for everybody else¹⁴.

Another aspect is the so-called techno-feudalism, a term I love, which refers to that weird time loophole we introduced with social media. In the Middle Ages, peasant farmers used to rent land owned by a lord to cultivate it and sustain their families. In addition to the rent rate, they were supposed to give back to the lord a part of the goods that resulted from their labour, like grain, wine, and oil.

On social media, we pay the rent for our profile with our data, but we are also “farming” the content that sustains the platform, without which the lord cannot survive. There is no Instagram or Youtube without user-generated content, and although we are happy to do so, we are both paying the rent and taxes with users’ free labour.

There Are No Conclusions For This Article

On the one hand, it is quite hard to wrap up all that I briefly touched upon; on the other hand, I don’t think the discourse should be concluded but rather continued.

In this article, I compare some of the patterns I see in fast fashion with some of the dynamics I see in the design supply chain. Starting from comparing the lifespan of fast fashion garments with the duration of digital experiences, going through the cost of both supply chains on resources and their sustainability toll, to the way that means of production impact labour and localisation of workers. I mainly wanted to write a provocation for designers out there.

I often hear that designers are good at “capturing complexity,” although I feel we are shortsighted regarding the design industry's systematic impact on sustainability.

I am not talking about the best sustainability practices in design, like optimising fonts, reusing code, using databases powered by green energy, etc. For me, this is the band-aid on top of a bigger wound, the “touchpoint” and not the “ecosystem.”

I am talking about the idea of rethinking the user experience not as the never-ending increase of engagement and content production but as a more conscious way to “consume” digital experiences for the user and more sustainable production from companies. 

Why, if we are so shocked by fast fashion, are we not equally disgusted by the process that turns millions of pixels on and off daily? Is it that our consciousness is numb to intangible actions that have serious consequences on real environments? What is the role of designers in all of this?

Although I don’t have the answers to these questions, I would like to conclude by sharing some of the books that sparked some of the reflections you read above, in case you might want to read them too:

• This Changes Everything - Naomi Klein

• Caps Lock - Ruben Pater

• Content - ​​Kate Eichhorn

• Technoluddism - Gavin Muller

• Stuck On The Platform - Geert Lovink

• World Wide Waste - Gerry McGovern

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