Sust: co-creating an open-source platform for empowering sustainable fashion consumers

The new research will continue I Didn't Buy's agenda of creating digital infrastructure to empower consumers to shop sustainably and motivate brands to bring more sustainable goods to market. We will concentrate on Fashion, where 20% of purchases are online, where there is established activism towards improving sustainability, and where it is becoming normative for industry to respond. We will utilise I Didn't Buy's prototype web browser plugin (development funded by Brigstow and continued by Matter II Media), which annotates e-commerce web pages with information related to sustainability. In this new project we will concentrate on how to gather that information. We will work with Fashion Revolution's global network of sustainable Fashion activists to co-create an open-source platform for gathering information about brands and products. In I Didn't Buy we learned that some consumer "detectives" are willing to put many hours into finding the information needed to make sustainable purchasing decisions. We ask: How can the platform best support them to find and share information which will be useful to other consumers as well? We will co-create ‘Sust’, the next iteration of the I Didn’t Buy prototype, by collecting input on functionality and design from our user groups, and iteratively improving and adapting the platform accordingly. We will pay particular attention to how to maintain the integrity of the information and how to summarise it for other consumers.