By: Tejaswini Nagesh, Francesco Sollitto, Marina Castán, Troy Nachtigall
Part of State of Responsible Tech 2025, Generative Things
Nagesh, T., Sollitto, F., Castán, M., Nachtigall, T. (2025). From Glitches to Fixes Hacking Loopholes for Sustainable Innovation. In RIOT 2025, State of Responsible Tech – Generative Things (pp. 97-103). Stichting ThingsCon Amsterdam
https://thingscon.org/publications/riot-2025/riot-2025-from-glitches-to-fixes-hacking-loopholes-for-sustainable-innovation/
Abstact (generated):
This contribution explores the role of systems thinking, hacker mindsets, and generative toolkits in addressing sustainability challenges within the fashion industry. Centered on the Loopholes Toolkit, the authors reflect on a participatory workshop held at ThingsCon that facilitated interdisciplinary innovation through structured engagement with emerging EU policy frameworks, digital product passports, and material-data entanglements. The paper positions data as a material co-agent in fashion’s digital transformation, and emphasizes the importance of embedding sustainability principles at the design stage. By enabling participants to explore interdependencies across design, regulation, and use, the toolkit supports ethical forms of “systems hacking” that reveal vulnerabilities and provoke speculative strategies. These include rethinking producer responsibility in decentralized manufacturing, engaging users in final production stages, and exposing loopholes within sustainability regulations. Drawing on theories of critical design, transition design, and more-than-human systems, the essay demonstrates how creative tools like Loopholes can foster systemic foresight and empower responsible innovation in generative clothing and beyond. It contributes a practical, reflective account of design methods for navigating socio-technical complexity in a rapidly evolving regulatory and ecological landscape.