Open Style Lab

A group of recent graduates have come together to change the way we approach clothing design. Grace Teo, who earned her PhD in Health Sciences and Technology from MIT this spring, together with her friend Alice Tin, who has a master’s degree in public health, founded Open Style Lab, a collaborative and interdisciplinary program to address the lack of adaptive clothing. In its first iteration, which took place during the summer of 2014, the workshop invited eight clients with diverse forms of disability to work with eight student teams, each comprised of an engineer, a designer, and an occupational therapist, to develop clothing for people of all abilities. The students who enrolled in the program came from MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Fashion Institute of Technology, among others. The workshop aimed to solve complex design challenges through a multidisciplinary approach grounded in user-centered design. Expert mentors -- designers, engineers, and occupational therapists -- provided guidance over the course of workshop. In addition to the students and co-founders, two other team members, Lea Yoon and Kavita Raghavendran, helped support the workshop in various ways.

The mission of the Open Style Lab is to make style accessible to people of all abilities
The Lab aims to do this by:
(*) Spreading awareness about the importance of clothing accessibility for people with disabilities.
(*) Developing educational programs and trainings to equip the community with the skills to create clothing that is accessible for people with disabilities, and
(*) Developing and distributing clothing designs and technologies that will increase the accessibility of clothing for people with disabilities.

The vision began to develop when Grace Teo was working at a hospital in Boston during her PhD. She met two lovely women who were both diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She noticed how starkly plain their clothing and jewelry was. After some head-scratching, she realized it was because these women had lost fine motor skills in their fingers and could no longer use buttons, zippers with small tabs etc. When Teo asked the lady what she missed most about being healthy, the answer in a word was “independence”. The lady went on to elaborate how that very morning, without the help of her husband who was away on business, she had had immense difficulty dressing and grooming herself for her visit to the hospital that day.

Unfortunately, the choice of adaptive clothing that people with disabilities can use is currently limited. The health and fashion industry lack a platform to meet and communicate. Most clothing is designed without accessibility considerations – and dress codes mean that people who cannot access certain apparel, cannot participate in the situations and events that call for them. Those situations can range from going on dates to advocating for clients in court.