Abstract:

Reductionism is the power that moved the majority of the researches during the XX century. Every complex phenomenon can be explained analysing the most basic mechanism operating into that specific phenomenon. “The part for everything”, the world analysed through its singular components.

But following this approach we can’t face the real complexity of nature. Today we have realized that nothing happens isolated, we live in an hyperconnected world where everything is connected and has a very complex architecture to be understood. Networks rules these architectures and they shape the nature around us. They dominate the environmental, biological phenomena as well as public relationships, not to mention all the processes steering industries in the market.

The digitalization developing today has risen up this web’s complexity within industries, especially that of fashion, which is changing throughout the whole value chain like never before, and it is starting to deal with digital networks to improve their profits and increase efficiency.

Data science, always perceived as something too mathematical by an industry that has always relied on creativity and instinct, has become a fundamental trait to face the complexity of fashion.

In fact, this large amount of structured and unstructured information can be turned into actionable insights to drive business growth. Even if considered “the oil of the future”, data are now applied to fashion only to specific bounded areas of investigation not considering that this quite-new subject can definitely help the whole system developing a new, holistic approach, which can disrupt the existing structure and improve market outreach programs and the overall system performance.

Considering the amount of data we can obtain from analytics in any phase of the chain, people nowadays are also dealing with creating clear representations of results, that may constitute valuable information and insights for the industry, but also for customers who can perceive the impacts their actions are having on the system, especially in fashion, that is hardly trying to become more sustainable and profitable.

Given that, data visualizations allow designers to create and build meanings from data, becoming a fundamental phase in the process of sense-making, making data more understandable and human-friendly.

In light of this scenario, Higher Education Institutions should include these processes innovation into the educational path of new professionals.

This paper will present a didactic innovation project based on the creation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with the aim to develop the interdisciplinary themes explained above.

Keywords:

Networks, Data, Fashion, Fashion Education, Innovation Processes.