The world is grappling with increasingly complex challenges, from global issues like climate change to local concerns such as rising asthma rates in communities near industrial zones. Tackling these problems requires collaboration between stakeholders across different domains, resulting in highly intricate, multi-stakeholder systems. These complex collaborations introduce unique challenges that make finding effective solutions difficult. While current design methodologies offer frameworks to support collaboration, their effectiveness diminishes as complexity grows, highlighting the urgent need for new, adaptive tools.

This research explores the potential of Large Language Model driven tools to enhance collaboration within these complex systems. It identifies key barriers to effective cooperation, including misaligned stakeholder values, communication breakdowns, and entrenched power dynamics. By addressing these challenges, LLM-powered tools offer a promising new approach to facilitate more inclusive, efficient, and adaptive collaborative processes. Through a combination of literature review and expert interviews, three critical themes that impact the succes of collaboration in complex systems were identified: Value Alignment, Communication & Certainty, and Power Structures. Traditional design methods are evaluated against these themes, highlighting their limitations in adequately addressing the complexities inherent in multi-stakeholder collaborations. To overcome these limitations, the study investigates the potential of LLM-based tools, notably leveraging OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o model, to facilitate improved stakeholder interactions, streamline communication, and balance power dynamics.

In the current fast-fashion regime, clothes are produced according to a linear economic model that continuously accelerates the cycles of take-make-waste. This has increasingly negative impacts on social and natural systems, causing concerns and desires to change this dominant way of producing and consuming clothing.
The practice of regenerative fashion offers a solution for making fashion that is good, causing positive impacts for the communities and ecosystems in which this practice is based. The regenerative philosophy is bound to place, leaving everything better than it was found.
For Dutch fashion designer Joline Jolink, the regenerative way of making fashion offers new opportunities to practice her job and passion in alignment with her personal values, especially by not contributing to the collective negative industry impact. With the founding of the Fashion Farm, she is mobilizing regenerative fashion in the Dutch apparel market and industry.
In order to increase her positive impact, she needs support from stakeholders to build capacity for her mission and enterprise. To establish meaningful relationships with stakeholders, she needs to communicate her goals, actions, and impact. This has led to the foundational purpose of this thesis, mainly trying to find answers to the problem/question:
‘How can she monitor and communicate her impact to stakeholders and internally in a transparent way in order to efficiently and effectively mobilize her mission further?’
To investigate this problem space and to design a tangible solution to support regenerative-driven entrepreneurs in monitoring and communicating impact, the Double Diamond method is put into practice. Through the adoption of sustainable transition theories and the Frame Innovation method, a well-rounded foundation was established before going into the solution space. After this, in-context, learning-by-doing baseline monitoring and reporting interventions were conducted. With both insights from the problem space and insights from the interventions, a strategic tool was designed that aims both to overcome the identified obstacles and to unlock new opportunities for stakeholders regarding impact monitoring and communication.
The main function of the tool is to enable internal, integrated documenting, planning, strategizing, and executing impact monitoring and communication. Next to this, the tool aims to establish increased collaboration, shared understanding, and responsibility in impact monitoring and communication in order to collectively accelerate the sustainability transition.
Besides, the tool advocates for communicating the ‘whole story’ of the intentions and actions of regenerative businesses. Lastly, the tool ensures—through the use of AI and automated activities—that organizations can internally perform impact monitoring and communication tasks in an effective and efficient manner. The ongoing feedback-looping system guarantees that fertile data is captured and fruitful insights are used to modify or redirect actions towards more positive effects.
Nevertheless, it is still difficult to mobilize regenerative businesses in the current economic space. The increased significance of impact monitoring and communication to enhance transparency and accountability is a good start, but it takes collective action on all levels of the system to create significant, long-lasting change, impact.

This research presents a conceptual design for a tool aimed at supporting fashion designers in creating new garments from existing ones, addressing the urgent need for circular practices in the fashion industry. While designers are critical to driving this transition, they lack practical resources to navigate the complexities of circular design. The proposed tool focuses on remanufacturing, a promising but under-explored strategy that enables the creation of new designs without breaking garments down into fibres for recycling. Despite its potential, remanufacturing poses significant challenges, underscoring the need to explore how designers can be effectively supported to scale this approach.

A case study with the low-cost textiles retailer Zeeman informed the tool's design, ensuring alignment with the company’s specific needs. Alongside the tool, a strategic roadmap outlines anticipated industry transformations, envisioning the tool’s phased development. The initial version (2025), tested by Zeeman’s design team, is based on feasible technologies and can be implemented immediately. Later versions (2030 & 2035) are designed to adapt to future developments, including changes in legislation, shifts in consumer behaviour, technological advancements, and potential partnerships envisioned for Zeeman.

By equipping designers with effective resources, the tool holds considerable promise. It enables designers to influence product development for the companies they work for and in that way foster more sustainable and circular practices, aligning with EU’s vision to have the textile industry fully circular by 2050.