Outsourcing: Mashing up design methods and technologies in the fashion industry

Offshore outsourcing is on the increase as businesses seek more cost effective manufacturing options for their products. Supporting outsourcing is as much about communication of tasks as it is about the tasks themselves. We argue that there is need for more fundamental research into the relationship between communication and design for remote collaboration. In this paper we explore early design and testing issues for a “mashup” of existing technologies to support remote collaboration for the fashion industry. We discuss the development of the Textual Virtual Tangible Multi-touch (TVTM) system (Yang et al 2010) for supporting remote collaboration via multi-touch tables, and explore the methodological decisions and early findings from a novel version of the Video Card Game (Buur & Soenderborg 2000) to study participants’ use of the system