Community enabled fashion PSS

As consumer habits evolve in response to global events, alternative means of consuming fashion have begun to be established. This movement away from customary wholesale-retail models within the fashion industry has opened up possibilities of alternative design solutions for engaging with the market. Practices such as sharing and co-owning of garments are examples of Product Service Systems [PSS] that are now viable alternatives to consuming garments brand new. The emergence of these alternatives has in turn opened up the possibilities for the kinds of design projects that can be proposed and constructed within academia. In this article we describe three PSS projects through case studies and undertake a reflection of the key network conditions that enabled the realization of these projects in the public sphere. Themes that are common to these projects are; university campuses act as protected spaces to incubate radical innovations, cross disciplinary collaborations within the university play a key role in the development of the projects, and the projects use an urban social ecosystem to prototype the solution. As a result, the overarching role of the community has been identified as the key driver for these projects and is bracketed as a crucial factor in PSS endeavors.