Fashion Design Education Towards Twin Transition Developing multidisciplinary skills for future professionals

The role of Fashion Design Education has been facing a renovation phase, being impacted by the green and digital “twin” transition, which has effects on contents delivered in educational paths and on approaches, tools, and channels chosen for training and educating new generations of young professionals. During their careers, fashion design students should be able to deepen some of the actual macro trends that are challenging and revolutionizing the industry scenario, such as the diffusion of sustainability issues, the effects and improvements of the digital transformation on the whole supply chain as well as new production and consumption dynamics renovating traditional business models (Bertola & Vandi, 2020). Considering this scenario, it becomes urgent to develop new professional creative profiles with multidisciplinary skills and flexible expertise, be trained to catch issues, create bridges between different disciplines, and connect with other fields. Leveraging this challenge, the Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) are progressively introducing research paths and didactic approaches for providing students with transdisciplinary knowledge (Iannilli & Sancassani, 2020). Open Educational Resources, e-Learning, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) favour the creation of a blended environment in which the hybridization between the digital and physical sphere enables active and collaborative learning, providing students with more hands-on activities of demonstration of how theoretical knowledge could be applied during project-based classes. Nevertheless, HEIs only partially address these new approaches within design and creative courses (Faerm, 2012; Bruff et al., 2013; Dove, 2020). The need for flexibility has also been expressively highlighted by the pandemic situation that has forced educators and students worldwide to work and learn from home, significantly increasing the adoption of digital tools in didactics but also showing a lack of awareness in mastering them (Mortati, 2020). In light of this scenario, how to train the next generation of fashion designers by equipping them in arts and fashion with digital innovative and multidisciplinary skills? As a response, the paper presents the collaborative European co-funded project “DigiMooD for CCIs – Digital modules of didactic for cultural and creative industries” run from 2018 and 2021, which has been considered an initial leading example of innovating design education with Open Educational Resources (OER). Through DigiMood, the consortium prepared for the next Digital Decade even before the pandemic crisis, identifying a set of new competencies and proposing and testing a new curriculum for the digital creative professionals, with a specific focus on the fashion field, from companies’ branding, lifecycle assessments to narrative strategies and digital service models. This has been achieved through direct field experimentation and a co-design approach that involved a multidisciplinary team of experts from academia and the fashion industry. The paper elaborates on the results of the project that provided students with the necessary knowledge to design and operate across disciplines within the fashion system while also testing and experiencing innovative learning environments through blended learning approaches, including the combination of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Field Projects and internship experiences.