IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

This paper argues that fashion and design higher education must rethink conventional studio pedagogy in response to an increasingly entangled and AI-driven cultural condition in which computation operates less as a discrete tool than as an ambient environment shaping perception, labour, circulation, and value. Rather than relying solely on the language of the post-internet, the paper situates contemporary creative practice within a broader constellation of forces — including the AI/data epoch, networked materialism, and renewed forms of hyper-physicality — that are reshaping how students research, design, and understand practice. Positioned within the author’s wider research on CTRL+BREATH Radical Fashion Practice in the AI/Data Epoch, the paper proposes experimental play as a pedagogical strategy for reactivating the relationship between research, embodiment, and design inquiry. Drawing on embodied pedagogy, somaesthetics, and playful learning, it reframes the studio not as a fixed site of delivery and evaluation, but as a temporary learning ecology structured through activation, interruption, and translation. The paper introduces five pedagogical activations — Unlearn, Score, Collide, Witness, and Distill — as a framework for studio-based experimentation in fashion and design. Together, these modes treat research as something to be embodied, misread, remixed, and translated across image, textile, object, movement, text, and performance. It argues that the future of creative pedagogy depends less on accelerating output than on cultivating attention, translation, and creative courage.