Designer, entrepreneur, and MFA DT faculty Sabine Seymour was recently featured on The Business of Fashion. In an article entitled Fashion Needs a More Robust Approach to Technology Education, Sabine was asked her input on the integration of technology and fashion:

However, the bigger question of how fashion education should integrate technology into courses has proved to be a highly debated topic within the industry. “We need completely new skill sets,” said Sabine Seymour, founder and chief executive of Supa, a platform that integrates data relating to the body — ranging from environmental factors to biometric data — from clothing.

“In the long-term, the curriculum needs to be completely changed, it needs to be much more hands-on than fashion education today,” said Seymour, a serial entrepreneur and researcher, who has been involved in wearables for nearly two decades with her consultancy Moondial. She is also the director of the fashionable technology lab at Parsons in New York.

Fashion education institutions need to provide a more diverse set of skills to students, she continued. Many of them do not possess the technical knowledge required to work in the intersection of fashion and technology. “We require a person that understands anything about data, behavioural analytics, material sciences and the construction methodologies that we need to apply, so very pragmatic skill sets,” said Seymour. “[But] we cannot make those hybrid students by just giving them a vertical education.”

You can read the article here and visit Sabine’s website, Moondial, here.