Urban Smart Kiosk for Cloth Sharing: The Revival of the Iranian Culture of Donation

Fashion has transformed to a serious lucrative tool in today's marketing, as it offers a wide range of choices to product users for their self-expression and look alterations, mostly through concentrating on users latent and blatant desires. However, fashion has been correspondingly considered, for a while now, as the fourth most pollutant industry after agriculture, mining, and transportation. That is, fashion has turned into a double-edged sword; by one edge, it finds its way to the realm of users’ social positioning, lifestyle and identity and by the another, it swords to the face of our existence, wellbeing and the environment. Soon of later, this double-sided life of fashion industry must be ceased or severely limited; the sooner, the better. One way of controlling the harmful footprint of fashion industry on the environment is to promote sharing behaviors of citizens through the donation of their clothes via providing clothes for underprivileged citizens; where, broken traditional and conventional rings of interpersonal relationships are juxtaposed within the context of urban environment. Consequently, people are not realized of their citizen fellows’ needs and capabilities. Smart Urban Systems (SUS) replaces traditional social networks and fills the gap of public trust amongst citizens for sharing their clothes. SUS will appropriately respond to the environmental concerns as well as supporting the trickle-down theory for the poor. In this paper, a framework is devised and suggested for the cultural establishment of trickle-down theory for the citizens, voluntarily willing to exchange, share or donate their clothes via the utilization of an urban furniture: A kiosk, enhanced to physically collect and deliver clothes and digitally manage the whole process of providing the service of sharing citizens’ clothes.