A pilot bringing DFOS into a university classroom as live creative infrastructure. Metalabel Studio partnered with London College of Fashion (LCF) to run the BA Creative Direction for Fashion Year 2 unit, Future Directions, on DFOS for a full semester, with a student cohort of 70. It replaced the ad hoc tools, like Instagram DMs, students typically default to for project work.
Developed jointly with Metalabel, the brief asked students to produce research-led short films on Gen Z attitudes across four themes: Digital Intimacy & Identity, Collective Creativity & New Models of Authorship, Regenerative Digital Worlds, and Cultural Signals & the Future of Taste-Making. The framing: as technological change accelerates, culture needs to move beyond individual authorship and extractive systems toward collective imagination, mutual care, and new creative economies.
Each of the four research groups had its own working space on the desktop, alongside shared infrastructure for Posts, Planning, Members, and a Selected Films folder. An intro film, event playlist, credits, panel recording, and onboarding links rounded it out, making the space part project archive, part event hub, part entry point into the wider dark forest ecosystem.
The unit culminated in a screening and panel at The Art House in Hackney. The panel brought together Danielle Paterson (Metalabel Studio), Izzy Wharton (LCF course lead), Christie Morgan (SOFTER), and Helen Job (New Future), joined by student speakers from the cohort, for a night about the future of creative collaboration and life online, grounded in what the students had made.
The space is now live as a standing archive at lcf.dfos.com.