Category: Unit 4

Wynne and Molly joined me for this interview.

Here are recordings for Wynne and Molly respectively

Wynne is a famous Chinese influencer. As an outfit and lifestyle blogger, she has a unique understanding of fashion trends, clothing design, and styling. She is currently working in the UK to document her life as a student, with a million bonus followers across the web.

Molly graduated with a bachelor degree in fashion engineering and has worked in a number of companies, such as Baoxiniao, Ontimeshow and Adidas, and has a lot of experience in brand promotion and product development.

Here’s the full recording of this Dragon Den. The guests of this time is Ralph Barker and Kumbirai Makumbe.

Ralph Hammond Cecil Barker (21 October 1917 – 16 May 2011) was an English non-fiction author with over twenty-five books to his credit. He wrote mainly about the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and Royal Air Force (RAF) operations in the First and Second World Wars, and about cricket.

Kumbirai Makumbe is a Zimbabwean new-media artist based in London.

This week my main experience was focused on the preparation of the draft evaluate report and the Dragon Den, besides thee continuation of interviews with experts and stakeholders and the collection of some samples for the new questionnaire.

I basically followed the requirements and the inspiration of the good examples(https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/mod/folder/view.php?id=1124070 ) to complete the writing of my own report. Although the research has not been stopped, but the basic writing framework is basically determined, and only need to add some conclusions and details of the study.

For next week’s DRAGON DEN event, I prepared a three-minute speech with a one-page resource.

Finally this week I had an interview with Lucy, a professional compiler for a luxury company, and the new questionnaire received 12 responses from within the creative industry.

Hi Everyone. My name is Gu and I am from China. My project is called bio-synthetic. First of all, let me briefly tell something about my background, my hometown Ningbo is a city for both biggest genuine fur manufacturing and biggest faux fur pieces. However, with the environment and animal issue in 10 years. Both of two industries are going downhill.

Therefore, how can reduce animal and environment influence for future fur products? Bio-synthetic fur is the potential solution for this answer and the way to rekindle public interest for those ancient industries.

Bio-synthetic essentially is a combination for iPSCs technology and shearing hair,iPSCs for skin panel synthesis while shearing process called Woolization for collecting animal hair without pain and cruelty. Finally, bio-synthetic fur is identical to genuine fur but without any negative impact for environment and animal.

By the end of today, my idea and program have earned more than 400 pieces of questionnaire and nearly 100% participant shows positive attitude toward bio-synthetic fur and it initially got the collaboration agreement with KC Lab from Columbia University. Moreover, my idea methodology is on stage of patent application in China and already get initial approval. Overall, the project has proceeded to move from theory to commercial realisation.

Lucy is a compiler for a fashion company based in London, her work focuses on luxury marketing. she was an undergraduate student of financial management and then went to the UK as a postgraduate student to study English-Chinese Interpreting.

Below is the audio recording related to the interview

This week I worked on four main areas: tutorial feedback, stakeholder interviews, questionnaire writing and theory learning.

George’s comments for this session were an addition and outlook based on my work last week, he wanted me to look for stakeholder from multiple backgrounds, increase the visual presentation in the interviews and make adjustments to the intake interviews.

Stakeholder interviews are divided into expert interviews and passerby interviews. This week I interviewed my classmate Zheng Shuang, a CSM student with a background in architecture and environment design, and Zhang Mengyu, a graduate student in curatorial design. In addition, I also collected feedback from four passers-by during the street interviews this week.

In addition, I researched two articles to support the logical flaws in the development of bio-synthetic fur that I discovered last week, as well as developing a related questionnaire.

This time, based on George’s suggestion, I attempted a street interview in front of the school campus, and luckily this time four people agreed to my interview request.

The following is the basic recording of this street interview

1. 你喜欢皮草制品吗？ Do you like fur products?

喜欢Yes 

不喜欢No

无感Not sure

2. 你使用过真皮皮草制品吗？Have you ever used genuine fur products?

使用过Yes

没用过No

3. 你使用皮草制品最大的障碍是什么？What is your biggest obstacle to using fur products?

价格 Price

道德舆论压力 Ethic Reasons

理念 Notion

性能 Performance

其他 Other

4. 道德舆论是否对于你购买使用真皮皮草制品的影响？Does ethical opinion have any influence on your purchase and use of genuine fur products?

是Yes

否No

不确定Not sure

5. 假如没有道德舆论方面的压力，你会不会接受或者加大对于皮草制品的使用？Would you accept or increase the use of genuine fur products if there was no pressure from moral opinion?

会 Yes

不会 No

不确定 Not sure

6. 刨出题三中所述的所有因素，你对真皮皮草这种材料本身的看法？Taking out all the factors described in question 3, what is your opinion of the material, genuine fur, itself?

Mengyu Zhang

Ms Zhang is a curatorial direction student in UAL, and from her personal experience, she is not a lover or user of fur products. Her knowledge of fur is mainly focused on the use of her parents’ generation and media reports. She supports the concept of bio-synthetic fur, but she also expresses her concern that when bio-synthetic fur is successfully developed and brought to the market, there will be unscrupulous merchants selling genuine fur under the banner of bio-synthetic fur (there is no difference in nature between the two). As for the plight of fur materials, apart from the pressure of moral opinion, Ms Zhang believes that consumerism is also a huge factor, as fur is being replaced by other materials as a symbol of wealth and status. Therefore, for the future positioning of bio-synthetic fur, Miss Zhang expects it to be a universal and cheaper material compared to genuine fur.

The above is a transcription of Miss Zhang’s interview.