Shaping Speculation: Experimental Research Spaces, the Knowledge Economy and the Role of the New Fashion Augur

Abstract

As we find ourselves in the midst of an escalating evaluation culture in art and design universities and colleges, there is concern from both within academia and the wider creative industries that any such assessment begins from an assumption that all creative expression can be conveniently and straightforwardly measured. As more open academic enquiry is being supplanted by evidence-based scholarship and agenda-driven initiatives (digital futures or health & wellbeing, for example), places of learning may be inadvertently inviting a progressive institutional loss of risk-taking and adventure in creative research. Much forward-thinking and alert research and innovation is increasingly happening and at a much faster pace in industry, and creative institutions will need to protect and extend their original didactic calling in novel or differing ways. Expectantly then, can we acquire and foster new means, channels and certification of creative excursion for academia? This pursuit does not just implicate the agenda or the medium, but a broader and defiantly uncertain notion of conceptual exploration. Thereafter, can we perceive fashion not just as a mission to create accomplished garments, objects, or environments, but instead as the production of new philosophical and theoretical conditions in which the discipline can further adjust, evolve, and challenge in socially and environmentally responsible ways? Within aspects of academic learning and research, this article argues for a need to replicate exploratory and open research models, centers, studios or creative initiatives that foster understanding of how unanticipated or unforeseen breakthroughs can ultimately prove more valuable than outcomes of set or prescribed research programs.

Keywords:

• fashion
• design practice
• failure
• research & innovation
• SACRED
• uncertainty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Thorogood

Simon Thorogood is senior research fellow at the London College of Fashion. Distinguished as being one of the earliest fashion designers to integrate digital interactive technology into practice, his research is concerned with communicating fashion design differently. He has exhibited his projects extensively internationally and he was the inaugural Fashion Designer in Residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum. [email protected]