The kick-off meeting of DESTEX project was held on October 3^rd and 4^th.  The project main objective is to promote the uptake of creativity culture as a catalyst to unlock the innovation potential in the advanced textiles’ materials sector.

The meeting was held at the University of Boras, in Sweden, as coordinator of the project. AEI Tèxtils, the Catalan Technical Textiles’ Cluster, is one of the partners along with 6 more organizations: the design school LCI Barcelona; the university Politecnico di Milano, the Danish design school Kolding, the Greek consulting firm CRE.THI.DEV, the training center CIAPE and the company Material Connexion Italia (MCI).

The project officially started on September 1^st, has a planned duration of 32 months,a budget of 318.676 € and is co-financed by the European Commission under the ERASMUS+ Programme within the strategic partnership for higher education action, with Grant Agreement 2019-1-SE01-KA203-060379.

DESTEX aims to bridge the tools from industrial and creative design to the manufacturing companies in the advanced textile materials ‘sector. In this line, the project main goals are:

• To support higher education students to acquire skills in transdisciplinary innovation based on creative and industrial design applied to the textile sector.
• To foster student cooperation in a multidisciplinary approach in workbased projects.
• To provide knowledge, skills and competences using virtual collaboration tools.
• To promote the application of good practices for the enhancement of innovative skills.

The kick-off meeting started on Thursday October 3^rd with the presentation of each of the organizations in the consortium, highlighting the motivations and expectations about the project. Each work package responsible then presented the initial work plan and the main activities to be performed in the next six months.

The first activity, led by LCI Barcelona in collaboration with AEI Tèxtils, will be the development of a MOOC (online open course) focused in the uptake of creative and industrial design in the advanced textile materials’ sector based on a first need analysis with the goal of creating a series of training resources that can become the foundation for a transdisciplinary innovation.

The second work package consists on the development of a book of lectures for the summer school that will be organized in the university Politecnico de Milano, in July 2021, focused on hands-on activities for developing innovative solutions in the advanced textiles’ manufacturing sector.

The third work package will focus on the development of a virtual platform for open innovation and project-based training of students using real case studies and challenges from industry

In the last work package, the team will create a handbook of good practices, compiling lessons learnt, project best practices and key success results.

Lastly, on Friday morning, the project team had a tour to the facilities of the textile department of the University of Boras, which has teaching and research laboratories with different textile manufacturing technologies including spinning, weaving, knitting, nonwoven and finishing. A highlight of the tour was the smart textiles lab, which is at the forefront in the field in Europe.

DESTEX project consortium team in the University of Boras during the kick off meeting