Design Cultures of Making: Fashion thinking as creative process and pedagogy

This paper shares research being developed through an Art and Humanities Research Council, Creative Industries Cluster funded 5-year project, the aim of which is to transform the competitiveness, agility and creative output of the UK’s fashion industry. Its focus is to develop innovative, multidisciplinary STEAM+D based fashion designers, industry facing training, and education for post graduates fashion students, breaking down traditional fashion and technology silos. Through their work a group of researchers at the Royal College of Art attached to the Future Fashion Factory Project (FFF) propose fashion thinking as a new rational for fashion education that has three distinct strands – fashion thinking for social- change, fashion thinking for applied specialisation and fashion thinking through advanced manufacturing. Fashion thinking through advanced manufacturing is discussed here highlighting Discourse, a tool developed to enable investigation into current pedagogic models, and revealing the importance of developing new language competencies for fashion