Collaboration and group work are increasingly recognized as essential formoving the textile and fashion sector towards a more sustainable future.Despite this awareness, many fashion and textile design educationscontinue to emphasize individual design processes in courses andprogram curricula. This research explores the possibilities and implicationsof collaboration for creative processes and developments in higher designeducation in a case study. The ongoing case-study examines an electivecourse in higher (fashion) design education where a real-life designassignment is implemented as the course task. The course “StudentManaged Design Project: Collaborative Project” aims to give studentsknowledge and skills in collaborative processes from a design perspective,where the collaborative content in the course syllabus is both collaborationwith an external part and collaboration with peers. The design assignment,conducted in partnership with a global organization, aims to design abusiness workwear collection based on a preexisting brief, and should alsofunction as an educational material in terms of sustainable solutions.Participants are a mixed group of undergraduate and graduate studentsand two facilitators who together form the design team that will conduct thedesign task. To facilitate the students’ collaborative processes throughoutsignificant phases such as brainstorming, ideation, sketching,prototyping, and refining, a framework for collaboration has beenestablished. Aspects such as design sensitivities, flexibility,communication, willingness of compromise and empathywere trained through the complexity of the collaborative designassignment.Opportunities, challenges, and limitations of the collaborative methods andstructure in the course are reflected upon. The data was collected throughobservations, visual documentation, recordings and a questionnaire. In thisongoing case study, significant notions and situations to enhancecollaboration were identified as re-aligning of groups, decision makingand actions and interactions. These will be subject to future research.