Co-Creating Futures invites fashion and design communities to collaboratively envision and build just, shared futures. It emphasizes collective responsibility and agency, urging participants to work together in ethical, justice-oriented ways. This approach means democratizing the imagination: participatory design opens creative space for many voices and yields more inclusive visions of the future. For example, one recent study invited consumers to become "researchers of their relationship with clothing," turning wearers and designers into co-creators of meaning. Together, we will explore how shared visions can rebuild, renew and transform the fashion ecosystem, putting human dignity and justice at its core.
Under the theme Co-Creating Futures: Shaping Fashion Through Shared Imagination, the conference explores four interrelated subthemes:
A
Plural Ways of Being Human
This subtheme explores the expanding and plural meanings of being human in a world shaped by cultural diversity, ecological interdependence, and more-than-human relations. It invites inquiries that move beyond universal or singular narratives of humanity to foreground multiplicity, situated knowledge, and coexistence. Drawing from indigenous wisdom, decolonial perspectives, post-human thought, and inclusive design practices, this theme considers how fashion and design can acknowledge diverse identities, bodies, cultures, and species. It asks how design practices might support multiple ways of living, knowing, and belonging without collapsing difference into sameness.
PluriverseIdentityDecolonialityIndigenous KnowledgeInclusivityMore-than-humanCultural SustainabilityEthicsCoexistenceSymbiotic Society
B
Capability, Care, and Creativity
This subtheme focuses on human capability in an era of automation, artificial intelligence, and accelerated change. Rather than equating capability with productivity or efficiency, it foregrounds judgment, care, creativity, learning, and ethical agency as vital human capacities. The theme welcomes research on fashion education, craft intelligence, embodied knowledge, and pedagogical innovation that prepares learners and practitioners for uncertainty rather than optimization. It asks what kinds of capabilities must be nurtured when skills are automated, and how care, empathy, and creative decision-making remain central to design practice and education.
Human CapabilityCare EthicsCreativityEducationCraft IntelligenceJudgmentLearning FuturesPost-AI SkillsPedagogySkilled Society
C
Regenerative Systems and Economies
This subtheme examines how fashion and design can contribute to regenerative systems that restore ecological, social, and cultural life. Moving beyond extractive and growth-led models, it invites research into circularity, material innovation, craft futures, and life-centred economic practices. The focus is on systems that operate within planetary boundaries while sustaining livelihoods, communities, and ecosystems. Contributions may address materials, production, supply chains, policy, or community-based practices that enable fashion to move from minimizing harm toward actively regenerating environments and cultures.
RegenerationCircular FashionSustainable MaterialsCraft FuturesEcological SystemsLife-centred EconomiesEthicsResiliencePolicySustainable Society
D
Co-Agency with Instruments and Technologies
This subtheme explores shared agency between humans, instruments, technologies, materials, and systems. It reframes tools not as passive utilities but as active participants in design processes and lived experiences. Welcoming both critical and experimental work, the theme spans digital technologies, AI, wearables, smart textiles, craft tools, and ecological systems. It asks how agency is distributed across human and non-human actors, and how design can foster responsible, ethical, and collaborative relationships between them. The emphasis is on coexistence, accountability, and relational futures rather than technological dominance.
Co-agencyInstrumentsTechnologyAISmart TextilesWearablesSystems DesignMaterial IntelligenceEthicsHuman–Technology RelationsSmart Society
