Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the work of a team of New Delhi-based designer-researchers aimed at redefining India’s national clothing size standards. It reveals how they evaluate universal and context-specific measures of inclusion and conceptualize public audiences as citizen-data

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the planning and execution activities of a team of New Delhi-based designer-researchers aimed at redefining India’s national clothing size standards. Born out of a dissatisfaction with sizing and proportional standards used in the ready-made apparel industry—e.g., for clothing tags, mannequins, and automated production machinery—that was created in the 1980s to primarily serve export markets, they now seek to ‘indigenize’ the industry’s production culture. As India’s domestic fashion consumer audiences have grown, industry size standards have been increasingly identified with ‘European’ bodies and criticized for societal harms, such as contributing to material waste and negatively impacting self-esteem through ‘ill-fit.’ However, as evident in the work of these designer-researchers, generating more inclusive nationally-specific sizing data is not straightforward. Drawing on anthropological perspectives on bureaucratic rationalization (Cohn 1996), the constitutive force of standards (Lampland and Star 2009), and the paradoxical exclusions of ‘inclusive’ initiatives (Partridge 2012), this paper explores how designer teams evaluate the applicability of universal and context-specific measures of inclusion during their conceptualization of public audiences as citizen-data.