Abstract:

In a globally interconnected, technological, increasingly ubiquitous context, fashion designers need to convert prospective information into meaningful, current and validated content that companies and professionals may quickly access and integrate into their practice. Fashion design thrives in multicultural, hyper connected settings, where learning happens as new projects are being developed. Fashion design cannot be fostered within a rigid environment (professional or educational), that do not promote, constantly and permanently, experiences and knowledge exchanges. So, what kind of learning would foster autonomous, prospective, meaningful experiences in fashion design? What principles would be necessary to frame such kind of learning?

This paper is part of a broader research about fashion design in higher education contexts, especially those offered online (distance learning) under a lifelong learning perspective, and for that reason it keeps certain premises that guided the study.
Firstly, it is this paper perspective that, similarly to what happens in fashion design development in professional scenarios, fashion design education should prompt opportunities of contextualized collaboration among learners, that come from multiple backgrounds, without the limitation of time and space. Next, in order to establish a lifelong, collaborative and creative experience, a greater fluidity would be expected between the learning / professional environments, allowing the learner / professional to travel in both ways, at different moments of their lives, and the acquired knowledge (professionally or academically) would be properly recognized. It is not the purpose of this paper to advocate that this fluidity can be better achieved by either online, onsite, blended or mobile supported learning systems. This leads to the final premise. Although it seems important to deeply acknowledge and study the technological possibilities for learning, simply propose a new delivery method is not enough. A meaningful learning experience should contemplate fashion design specificities, meet different professional needs, be prepared for the demands and impermanence of the sector, and create broader learning opportunities. Therefore, in order to accomplish that, a valid set of principles must be firstly established, and this is the main purpose of this paper.

One of the most important aspects of this study was to examine a theoretical perspective that could ground fashion design education, and in doing so, contemplated fashion as a complex, cross disciplinary phenomenon, that presents specificities (a global system of massive production and acceptance of clothes and styles for a certain period of time, which entails highly expected and constant demand for innovation and creativity, originality and prospective information) that needed to be contemplated when establishing a set of learning principles. After an exploratory study carried out on existing researches about fashion design education, a set of learning principles were structured under the Heutagogy approach, considered in this paper a promising theory, since it sustains a student-centred, self-determined, double-loop lifelong learning perspective. Finally, those principles were used to analyse previously selected fashion design higher education programs, offered online and recommendations are presented.

Keywords:

Fashion design, online learning, heutagogical principles.