The fashion industry needs critical digital thinkers and makers, the new Digital Fashion Technology master's track trains them

Last academic year, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) completed the first edition of a new master's track: Digital Fashion Technology, whose second cohort of students started this month. The track was developed together with AMFI and the associated Fashion Research & Technology research group, and falls under the broader Master Digital Design. The one year master trains design professionals to take a critical look at the fashion industry and the impact of digital tools on it. FashionUnited spoke with lecturer Lisette Vonk and students Siena van der Laarse and Verona Kragten about the first year of the programme.

A new route within Digital Design

The Master Digital Design offers two learning routes. Interaction Design, which looks at how interaction design can solve problems in fields such as healthcare, has run for eight years. Digital Fashion Technology, developed together with AMFI, started last academic year. "The route was set up to train design professionals to critically assess the impact digital tools can have on the fashion industry," Vonk said. Students do not need a background in fashion design to apply. The programme draws applicants from fashion design, branding and management, architecture and ICT alike. "We need people who can frame, design, make and analyse in order to apply digitalisation well and assess it critically," she said.

An intensive, one-year programme

The master runs for one year and opens with a five-week Foundation phase, in which students learn design and design research methodologies, digital-making skills, and ethical reflection, alongside lessons on fashion history and the value chain. Two major projects follow. In the first semester, students take on an Industry Project, working in interdisciplinary teams on a challenge set by a fashion industry partner. One group last year explored an affordable way to translate physical knitted fabrics into a digital twin, while another examined how digital product passports could be applied. Each project ends with a working prototype and a research paper documenting the process and findings.

In the second semester, students define their own capstone project, often building on the research group's existing work, an industry question, or an idea of their own. "We challenge students not to research what has already been researched, but to look critically at what the industry needs and where knowledge is still missing," Vonk said.

Across three overarching themes, Digital Only Fashion, Hybrid Fashion, and Consumer & Business Innovation, students build a self-directed, individual portfolio rather than following one fixed track.

From the ballet stage to a knitwear lab

For her industry project, Siena van der Laarse worked with five fellow students across different disciplines on an assignment for the Dutch National Opera & Ballet, digitally recreating three costumes from a previous production. The team used CLO3D for garment and pattern development, Substance Painter for materials and textures, and Blender to build the digital environment. "The biggest takeaway for me was learning how to work as part of a multidisciplinary team on a large-scale industry project," Van der Laarse said.

She continued the collaboration for her capstone project, researching how 3D printing can be applied to historical costume design. She experimented with printing a historical collar and recreating a corset using PHA, a more sustainable material, to test its potential for wearable costumes. "This process helped me make informed design decisions and shaped the final result of my research," she said. Van der Laarse now works as a digital designer at Studio Anneloes.

Verona Kragten came into the master with a bachelor's degree in software development, without a fashion background. For her industry project, she worked with three classmates on an assignment for Knitwear Lab, a company that uses digital fashion visualisation for client communication, among other purposes. The brief: find a way to digitise the height variation in certain knitted patterns, something standard fabric scanners cannot capture accurately. After testing several scanning methods and lighting set-ups, the team streamlined a working process and handed Knitwear Lab a manual for it. "I really valued the direct contact with the industry partner," Kragten said.

For her capstone project, Kragten is researching what it is like to wear light-emitting clothing daily, using first-person research to explore garments in which light plays a subtle, aesthetic role rather than defining the whole outfit. One unexpected insight: the effect barely works in daylight or well-lit spaces, since light-emitting materials need darkness to be visible, while non-luminous materials need light to be seen at all. "There is an incompatibility between the two materials in a partly light-emitting outfit," she said.

Critical of digital tools, not just fluent in them

A recurring theme across the programme is that digital tools are not automatically an improvement. "We do not believe that digital tools always make the world better. You can use digitalisation just as well to make things worse," Vonk said. Students are pushed to weigh the pros and cons of what they make, and sometimes conclude that, despite good intentions, a prototype should not be used at all.

That critical lens extends to sustainability, circularity, decoloniality and ethics, subjects students explore through coursework as they develop their own point of view. "We need not only critical thinkers, but critical doers," Vonk said, describing the ambition to send graduates into the industry equipped to help drive its digital transition, rather than follow every new trend uncritically.

Open to industry partners

Collaboration with the industry runs through the entire programme, from guest lectures to feedback sessions where students present their work. Companies can apply to become an industry partner and submit a challenge for a new group of students each year, a commitment Vonk put at roughly three hours of time and no cost. Businesses can also give a guest lecture or attend a feedback session to meet students and follow their work. "We are always open to other ways of collaborating that we haven't thought of yet," Vonk said.

Now in its second year, the programme has sharpened its three themes and refined how industry projects are guided, while giving more attention to originality in capstone research. Vonk's message to the wider industry: digitalisation, accelerated further by the rise of generative AI, needs new critical insight, and collaborating with the master's students is one low-threshold way to build it.