Donghua University’s design discipline has achieved a historic leap, ranking 7th nationwide in the 2025 Soft Science China Best Disciplines Ranking and rising to No. 1 nationally in the talent training indicator. Building on this milestone, the university recently hosted the high-level academic seminar “Hyper-Fashion: Design-Driven Future Interfaces” at its Yan’an Road Campus. The event brought together leading domestic design education experts—including Ning Gang, Zhan Heping, Fan Shengxi, Yang Dongjiang, Wu Haiyan, Wang Min, Han Ting, Fan Kaixi, and Wang Xiaosong—to provide targeted insights and strategic recommendations in support of cultivating a first-class design discipline at Donghua University.
Vice President Zhang Qinghua attended the meeting and delivered the concluding speech, stressing that the design discipline must closely align with national and regional industry development strategies while integrating into the university’s overall disciplinary layout. He emphasized the need to clarify disciplinary positioning and development missions, benchmark against the new round of the “Double First-Class” initiative, and develop relevant policy measures to strengthen a “service-and-contribution-oriented” evaluation system. Zhang called for accelerating the creation of new disciplinary peaks and urged the college to enhance planning execution, pay attention to detailed and grassroots-level work—the “nerve endings”—and ensure that strategic blueprints translate into concrete, actionable outcomes.
Sun Jie, Dean of the College of Fashion and Art Design, presided over the seminar and delivered a keynote report outlining the college’s historical evolution, recent progress, and development strategies for the design discipline during the “15th Five-Year Plan” period. Moving forward, the discipline will focus on sustainable fashion design aimed at smart industrial transformation and future social life, cultivating innovative design leaders with “global fashion competence.” The college aims to build a first-class design education “Donghua Paradigm,” centered on the core concept of “Hyper-Fashion” and driven by three pillars—“Sustainable Fashion,” “Design Drive,” and “Intelligent Technology.” This approach seeks to foster deep interdisciplinary integration across design, art, engineering, computer science, and business.
Participating experts held in-depth and productive discussions around the seminar theme, “Hyper-Fashion: The Future Interface Driven by Design.” They affirmed the foresight and strategic value of the “Hyper-Fashion” concept, which reinterprets the meaning of fashion through interdisciplinary design and positions it as a “super interface” that connects the physical and virtual worlds. The experts noted that Donghua University benefits from both its Shanghai location and its distinctive advantage in the integration of art and engineering. They advised the discipline to uphold the trinity of “Hyper-Fashion—High Intelligence—Strong Culture,” deepen exploration into cutting-edge fields such as digitalization and intelligence, and focus on building a “fashion-led” design discipline ecosystem and an urban design education model. They encouraged Donghua to contribute more actively to Shanghai’s “World Design Capital” development, support regional economic and social progress, and lead contemporary fashion trends.
Regarding interdisciplinary development, invited experts offered four key recommendations. First, to establish practical and effective disciplinary management mechanisms to realize deeper integration of professional resources and interdisciplinary collaborative innovation through diverse approaches such as cross-disciplinary curriculum construction and joint scientific research. Second, to further integrate internal resources to strengthen alignment with the university’s overall disciplinary ecosystem and participate more proactively in national design discipline development. Third, to support the college in developing achievement evaluation standards and faculty recruitment mechanisms that reflect its professional characteristics and disciplinary development needs. Fourth, to deepen industry-education integration to ensure that interdisciplinary development effectively serves social innovation and industrial upgrading. They suggested exploring the establishment of a “Design Fund” and promoting educational optimization and reform through industry-university-research integration.
The seminar also featured a special report from the Higher Education Research Department of Qingta, titled “Comparison and First-Class Advancement Analysis of Donghua University’s Design Discipline.” Drawing on the policy orientation of the new “Double First-Class” construction cycle, the report provided targeted suggestions to support Donghua in accelerating the development of a first-class design discipline. More than 70 participants attended the seminar, including leaders from the Office of Development Planning, the College of Fashion and Art Design, the Shanghai International College of Fashion and Innovation, and the Shanghai Textile and Fashion Museum, as well as representatives of the professoriate, teachers from the Discipline Development Center, and young and mid-career academic backbones.
It is reported that Donghua University is vigorously advancing the optimization of its disciplinary and professional layout. Focusing on three core directions—“Textile + Fashion,” “Materials + Energy,” and “Intelligence + Health”—the university is building disciplinary clusters, developing new models for characteristic and advantageous disciplines, cultivating five strategic emerging disciplines, and leveraging them to strengthen basic disciplines, humanities, and social sciences. Through this work, Donghua aims to gradually form a disciplinary ecosystem aligned with the construction of a high-level research university. Looking ahead, the university will continue to prioritize deepening interdisciplinary integration, resource coordination, and organized scientific research, striving to build a new “Grand Design” disciplinary construction model and accelerate the advancement of a first-class design discipline.