WORTH MENTOR INTERVIEW: SOPHIE ODIC

This week we had a fascinating interview with WORTH Partnership Mentor Sophie Odic. Sophie is a textile designer and freelance consultant with a broad range of industry experience regarding design and passes on her knowledge in Paris where she works at Studio O-di-C providing expertise in craftsmanship, collections, marketing, design and product development, conferencing and training.

We asked her about what design means to her personally and what would be her best advice for current and future WORTH Project participants:

You have an amazing range of experience within the European design industry, why is design personally important to you?
As a designer my goal is to bring harmony to our environment in general, through objects, garments, interiors… that surround us. As designers, we don’t save lives every day! – but we enhance the aesthetic and emotional part of our society, and by doing this, life becomes softer and better. As human beings we cannot stand only in the effective and rational part of life. We need poetry, imagination, dreams… it is as important as breathing. But obviously these designs need to meet some notions such as ergonomics, sustainability, consistency. It has to be relevant for its user, and to be right in its time.

There are several WORTH Partnership Projects relating to fashion design and wearable technology, what would be your best piece of advice to ensure their projects are successful?
We live in an over-stimulating world, with an over-production of everything, these being material or virtual. There is simply too much of everything. Any new project, whatever it is, needs to have a right and real reason to come up. If it is just another thing, with no dimension and aim to a “better world”, we don’t need it. I don’t mean this in a “naïve way”, I just mean that there are so many things that can still be improved, there are so many things that need to be questioned, such as our way of production and our way of consumption for example.

In the current design industry is there an upcoming trend that you particularly like and want to see further developed in the future?
I am very interested in all the projects that question our way of production: what we produce, with what materials? For how long? I work in fashion so this is obviously the big question at the moment.

The WORTH Partnership Project brings together creatives from all over Europe to work together on a mutual project, why do you think cross-boarder connections in the EU design industry is important?
Cross boarder connections, creative and mutual projects… All of this means PEACE, and that we live in a democracy.

Find out more about Sophie Odic here.