IAAC Fab Lab Barcelona is pleased to announce its partnership in shemakes.eu, an important two-year European-Union-funded project under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

The goal
The goal of shemakes.eu is to empower future female innovators of the sustainable fashion industry through inspiration, skills and networks

The challenge
Women in the textile and clothing industry are currently most represented in the lowest-paying jobs; their positions are affected by systemic gender constructs while their natural and acquired skills are assigned low value in traditional business structures.

The Solution
Create opportunity structures and business environments (such as circular, sustainable and near-shored) that enable women to move into roles of increasing power and income through access to hard skills, technology and innovation as well as to networking, business modelling and role models.

Outcomes
The project expects to produce a range of concrete impacts on textile and clothing manufacturing in at least ten European countries and provide a roadmap for policy change, making it replicable on an even larger scale. We envisage a more circular sustainable fashion industry guided by concepts of equality, innovation and openness, in which female creativity, craftswomanship and compassion are recognized as drivers of success.

Project Structure
Within the shemakes project we use a three-pronged approach to reach our goals. We provide innovative learning paths for girls and women of various ages, concrete business support and connections, and inspiring stories of female role models. We recognize that to generate the large-scale mindset shift required to change the prospects of women in this industry, there is no simple, magic formula, so we operate on multiple intersecting planes.

Essential to our ability to address the issue of gender in the T&C industry is the partnership consortium’s combined, multi-disciplinary experience and wide-reaching networks. Two extant networks addressing textiles, sustainability and innovation form the core of our community: Fabricademy, a transdisciplinary course that focuses on the development of new technologies and approaches in the textile industry; and TCBL (Textile Clothing and Business Labs) a project and now Foundation that focuses on co-developing testbeds for cutting edge innovation in the sustainable and circular fashion industry. The values and learning models of Fabricademy feed into the shemakes system, while TCBL’s diffused lab model and network of associates is another one of the bases of our new project.

A third branch of the project, supporting the two core activities, seeks to inspire girls and women to achieve their goals. We’ll be identifying and promoting a range of female role models within the community who we see as contributing to or leading the way in the sector’s transformation. The project website and social media will provide stories and opportunities to interact with these role models whose ideas and actions are being implemented into our community.

Our Contribution
An integrated innovation ecosystem with learning paths modelled on the Fabricademy curricula, engaging girls and women innovators belonging to three age groups.

? Innovation Services / based on the TCBL Lab Service model, engaging local communities and businesses in collaborative innovation activities
? Reputation Management promoting different types of role models within the community of girls and women leading the way in the sector’s transformation.

Our role in the project is to define and test Learning Paths from young girls to women innovators.These learning paths will incorporate, adapt, diversify and expand the offer of the Fabricademy program into existing projects and curricula for different age groups for different age groups and gender targets.
Technical knowledge related to textiles and clothing, from crafts techniques to additive manufacturing; this can include pattern making, sustainability, textile applications, 3D modelling, materials, DIY recipes, sewing, weaving, knitting, dyeing, printing, screen printing.

? Practical learning by doing through experimentations in Lab infrastructures, a weekly challenge to face in situ, and the design of individual projects,
? Soft skills integrating specific materials related to circular design, user-centred innovation and business modelling activities based on the Hypathia toolkit.

Partnership
Shemakes.eu is a two-year European-Union funded initiative with a consortium of ten partners in seven countries.

The lead partner is CEDECS-TCBL, a French innovation and business development consultancy that is the service company of the TCBL Foundation. Other partners are: the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), Waag in Amsterdam, Onl’Fait in Geneva, Fab Lab León, Redu in Iasi (Romania), Matrix based in Düsseldorf, and the global organization Makesense. Evaluation is carried out by The Tavistock Institute GmbH. Communications are managed by Flod, a Florence (Italy) agency.

For more information please see the website www.shemakes.eu and follow on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter @shemakes_eu).