The impact of the Lab will be on display at the Harper's BAZAAR ICONS event, which kicks off New York Fashion Week, on Friday, September 7, 2018, at the Plaza Hotel. Infor has sponsored the event for five years, demonstrating its commitment not just to the fashion industry but also to design excellence from the runway to enterprise software. At this year's event, a student-created, high-fashion, wearable-tech gown—designed and fabricated in the DTech Lab—will be worn on the celebrity-packed red carpet.
In June 2018 the Swedish Fashion Council sponsored an event at the Residence of the Swedish Consulate General in New York City where the student-designed creations were presented to the press, industry leaders, and academia. In attendance—in addition to the FIT student and faculty participants—were Dr. Joyce F. Brown, FIT President, Leif Pagrotsky, Swedish Consul General, and Ann-Sofie Back.
The FIT student teams had unique access to brands, technology and guidance and the opportunity to research, design and "build" innovative high-end products. These hands-on projects gave them real world problems to solve and a supportive environment constructed to spark and cultivate their creativity.
POC and BACK were able to directly engage with their target audiences and invite them to be part of the creative process of conceiving and building the future state of their brands. The projects are microcosms of how the new brand/customer relationships that are being forged through connectivity, data, and communication.
Infor gains valuable insights into how the next generation of technology users would design the next generation of technology. These projects reveal the advent of "fashion users" as opposed to "fashion consumers" and that could profoundly change the demands on and requirements for next-generation ERP, CRM and POS software—and not just for fashion industries.
Infor has already been exploring the potential of wearables in other industries, and projects like these emphasis the importance of user inputs in the software design and development process. As the world moves to a more fully connected Internet of Things(IoT), this student work from the DTech Lab demonstrates that the next-generation workforce—the next generation of fashion designers, software designers, fashion consumers, and technology users—sees the value and impact of this connectiveness in ways they have only just begun to imagine.