I sent my application for the MA Design Management and Cultures exactly a year ago. I didn't know what exactly, but I already knew my project would be revolving around sustainability in the fashion industry. As per my master's application, I aimed to create the perfect environment for the celebration of an ethical fashion event. By December, the proposal had evolved into an analysis of the communication strategy of sustainable fashion with Millennials as my target group. In a week, we'll have to submit our final research proposal and after looking at the same topic and seeing it evolving over and over for the past 12 months, creativity has somehow stopped flowing through my brain.
Today we had a workshop to enable responsive creative decision-making for our FMPs (final major projects) and let me say it was extremely productive and made evident how beneficial it can be that our projects get informed by people completely unfamiliar with them.
The most relevant, which eventually led to modifying the title and research question of my FMP, was the idea of demystification. After a lot of group thinking, we managed to reformulate it in order to lower its difficulty whilst keeping its importance high and slip it down from an aspirational goal to a 'major project one' (also called, 'high ROI').
The other two decisions that emerged from the team intervention were related to the stakeholders, one extreme and one unintentional. The former consists of engaging an audience who is not interested in fashion and rather choose to just be comfortable in their clothes, and the second one addressing businesses who want to preserve traditional practices.
Something that I particularly enjoyed from today's session was how it challenged us to reconsider the impacts of our decisions both in our FMP approach and among its stakeholders.
By the end of the session, I realized how oblivious I was regarding some major aspects of my project.
