Researcher, strategist and speaker working on the near future of being human.

Portrait of Beata Wilczek Bailly, researcher, strategist and keynote speaker. Photo: Gosia Turczynska

I study how AI and emerging technologies reshape bodies, knowledge, creativity and identity. I work with brands, technology companies, universities and institutions through research, workshops, talks and strategy.

Full bio

Beata Wilczek Bailly is a researcher, strategist and speaker working on the near future of being human. Her doctoral research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Aalto University is the largest global study of digital fashion education to date: 370 programmes across 54 countries, examining platformisation, digital literacy and who owns design education. She is the founder of UNFOLDING, a strategy and education studio, and has worked with BMW, Nike, T-Mobile, H&M and VORN Berlin. As Head of Impact at The Dematerialised she designed and launched REAL, a transparency standard for digital goods.

She has taught for more than ten years: as visiting professor at the University of Virginia, as lecturer at AMD Berlin, School of Form and ESMOD Berlin, and as co-developer of an MA in Social Design and Sustainable Innovation (Berlin/Beirut). She has presented her work from Mexico to Japan, with talks in the US, China, Taiwan, Lebanon and across Europe, and led workshops for groups of up to 100 people. She hosts the podcast Fashion Knowledge and writes the newsletter New Patterns. Before research, she worked as an art director and curator.

My methodAn interdisciplinary approach combining social psychology, design research and speculative futures, from how people live with emerging technologies today to futures imagined with them. It reveals what data alone misses: how people will feel, behave and decide, early enough to design for it.

Selected Clients

  • BMW
  • Nike
  • T-Mobile
  • H&M
  • Reserved
  • 4F
  • VORN Berlin
  • The Dematerialised

Selected Talks

  • Google
  • Warsaw Stock Exchange
  • Parsons School of Design
  • AlphaTauri x T-Mobile
  • Fotografiska
  • Vogue Polska
  • Copenhagen Fashion Week

Teaching

  • University of Virginia
  • Central Saint Martins, UAL
  • London College of Fashion, UAL
  • Aalto University
  • Universität der Künste Berlin
  • Bunka Fashion College, Tokyo
  • AMD Akademie Mode & Design, Berlin
  • School of Form, SWPS University

Education

  • PhD, thesis submitted, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, and Aalto University, Finland
  • MA Culture, Criticism and Curation, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK
  • MA Social Psychology, SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland
ListenPhysical AI, Jacquard & Wearable Tech with Ivan Poupyrev · Fashion Knowledge, E18 ↗ WatchRe-imagining Fashion: Towards an Ethical Future · Vogue Polska & BCG summit, 2022 ↗ ReadThe Blueprint for Digital Literacy in Fashion · New Patterns, 2024 ↗

Projects

01LUNA 2045In development · Since 2025

LUNA 2045: a child sits between tall concrete walls, facing a violet and orange sunset

Designing for Gen Beta: What the First AI-Native Generation Will Desire and Fear by 2045

Read more

Gen Beta, children born from 2025, will grow up with AI assistants, smart materials and a hotter planet as everyday facts. What will they expect from the things they eat, wear, own and trust? LUNA 2045 follows one girl from her first steps to her twentieth birthday through seven questions: what will she eat, own, do for work, want, trust, fear and believe? Drawing on more than a hundred futures reports and academic research, it imagines her world in concrete detail, and what brands, products and institutions will need to become to matter in her life.

#gen beta · #futures · #consumer behaviour · #artificial intelligence

02LOOMXIn development · Since 2026

LOOMX: a humanoid robot in a sheer white jacket sits on a dark sofa, lacing up black heeled boots

Dressing the Machine: Fashion as an Interface for AI Personhood

Read more

As humanoid robots move from laboratories into homes and workplaces, they arrive with bodies, and bodies are rarely left undressed. LOOMX uses clothing as a design probe into AI personhood, autonomy and agency. Should humanoids be styled to resemble us, marked as different, or allowed to choose? Treating fashion as a surface where identity, control and social roles are negotiated, the project surfaces emerging behaviours and design tensions in human-robot interaction, and asks who gets to decide what embodied AI looks like, represents and becomes.

#embodied AI · #humanoid robotics · #speculative design · #identity

03Decentralised CreativityPhD thesis · 2026

Decentralised Creativity: map of 370 digital fashion education programmes across 54 countries

Who Owns Design Education? Platforms, Digital Literacy and Counter-Futures

Read more

Design education is being platformised. The software that students learn on increasingly defines what they can make, and who profits from their skills. In the largest global study of digital fashion education to date, conducted with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Aalto University, this research maps 370 programmes across 54 countries. It shows how tools, skills and investment concentrate in a small number of corporations and institutions in the Global North, and raises a central question: who owns design education when platforms sit inside the curriculum, now and in the future? In response, it proposes decentralised creativity, a concept, alternative models and five counter-futures for creative education beyond platform dependency, geography and software licences.

#platformisation · #digital literacy · #design education · #counter-futures

04Body AtlasLectures & talks · Since 2024

Body Atlas: lineup of avatars and virtual humans from a lecture by Beata Wilczek Bailly

Avatars, Virtual Humans and the Data That Shapes Them

Read more

Avatars and virtual humans are increasingly where identity, commerce and care meet the body, yet they are rarely examined as designed interfaces. Body Atlas is an evolving research and lecture series that traces their lineage, from early avatars to AI-generated virtual humans, and examines the psychology of embodied interaction. It follows their application in virtual try-on, styling agents and immersive retail, grounded in body data and anthropometry. Developed through talks and teaching since 2024, each iteration absorbs what the field does next.

#avatars · #virtual humans · #embodiment · #retail

05Why Would You Even Wear That?Nike · 2023

Why Would You Even Wear That? The five motivators model: freedom, function, pleasure, care and fear Why Would You Even Wear That? Slide on freedom as a motivator Why Would You Even Wear That? Slide on fear as a motivator

A Behavioural Model of Dress Under Uncertainty

Read more

What do people choose to wear when the world feels unstable? Commissioned by Nike, this study proposes a working model of five motivators that govern dress under uncertainty: freedom, function, pleasure, care and fear. Each is grounded in behavioural theory, from dopamine and ownership to moral licensing and terror management. The central finding inverts a common assumption of brand strategy: in unstable times, fear dresses us more than desire does.

#consumer psychology · #behaviour · #fashion · #uncertainty

06Heat FuturesAlphaTauri x T-Mobile · 2023

Heat Futures: timeline of wearable technology from 1757 to 2023

Speculating Heated Garments from Mars to the Data-Centre City

Read more

Clothing began as climate control. For AlphaTauri and T-Mobile's app-controlled heatable collection, this project looked backwards and forwards at once: through the history of wearable technology, from early spectacles to AI-integrated garments, and into its possible futures. It then speculates on where heated garments could go next: dressing settlers on Mars, and people living in cities overtaken by data centres, where heat becomes both a resource and a hazard. Published afterwards as a public series, the work treats heat as wearable technology's oldest function and one of its most open futures.

#wearable technology · #speculative design · #climate · #heat

07REALThe Dematerialised · 2022

REAL transparency standard: product page with disclosure label REAL transparency standard: disclosure categories on a digital product page

A Transparency Standard for the Hidden Labour of Digital Goods

Read more

Digital products are neither immaterial nor free of labour. REAL is a disclosure standard designed and launched at The Dematerialised that makes visible what a smart contract can record but a buyer never reads: makers, tools, places, production time, carbon and file size. Six disclosure categories and a certification label carry this information onto the product page. Taken through legal and engineering review and live since 2022, REAL turns transparency from a promise into infrastructure.

#transparency · #digital fashion · #labour · #standards