Reducing Waste in Production and Consumption of Clothing through Intelligent Decision-Support Tools

The fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters and exploiters of human resources in the world, but also one of the least efficient: our research shows as little as 58 percent of clothing produced is sold, and as little as 4 percent of clothing sold is used regularly. Industry efforts to improve sustainability often focus on solutions like material choices or circular design strategies, but rarely consider tools for sustainably reducing production and consumption. Our approach formalizes the tacit knowledge of apparel design to inform decision-making tools to augment human intelligence with machine intelligence, and minimize wasteful production and consumption (SDG#12).