What happens when a university class doesn’t just use the internet, but creates its own?

This past semester, a course at London College of Fashion calledFuture Directions ran on DFOS.

Seventy students used DFOS as the infrastructure for the class: a place to research, communicate, organize, publish, screen work, and preserve what they made together.

The class became its own internet.

How it worked

Students were asked to create research-led short films exploring Gen Z attitudes across four themes:

• Digital Intimacy & Identity
• Collective Creativity & New Models of Authorship
• Regenerative Digital Worlds
• Cultural Signals & the Future of Taste-Making

Each research group had its own working space inside the LCF DFOS, while sharing the same infrastructure for posts, planning, members, events, and the final work.

The unit culminated in a public screening and panel in London. The students’ films were shown, followed by a conversation about creative collaboration and life online.

During the semester, DFOS was the students’ working environment. During the final event, it became the public face of the project. Now it’s the project’s permanent archive.

What began as a private working space became a public cultural event.

Explore it here.

What’s next

After this first test, the London College of Fashion plans to expand its use of DFOS next semester. We’re excited to build on the experiment and explore how DFOS can support educational groups.

We see DFOS as especially useful in creative contexts, where both private collaboration and public distribution are important, and almost impossible to do in the same place.

Which brings us to this week's DFOS product update...

DFOS product updates

DFOS lets a community and work be as private as it wants. But what if you want to communicate to the outside world what's happening within?

This week we’re introducing an optional Front Page for DFOS spaces.

When making a DFOS, creators can now choose between three options:

• No public site: accessible only to members
• Join page: a landing page with a sign-up form
• Front page: a modular public profile for the space

Front Pages show the desktop wallpaper of your space, a special bio, and any posts the creator chooses to make public. Visitors are encourage to join the space to interact or see more.

To start, Front Pages feature posts. Soon galleries, videos, stores, calendars, and other ways of showing slices of life from inside the forest will be available as well.

Front Pages are available to all DFOS spaces starting today.

Explore a few examples: DFOS home , A-corp and YStrickler.

A DFOS can be a community, publication, studio, institution, scene, or world.

What could yours become?