This study aims to reflect on a possible symbiosis between the fashion system and unrelated companies focused on reducing textile waste. Recent developments in the fashion system, in terms of the organizational network, highlight the importance of collaboration, or vice versa of competition enhancement mechanisms. The highly innovative and creative skills and tasks concentrate much of the value in the creation phase, characteristic of emerging sectors such as creative ones. The methodology will be carried out through a review of the reference literature, with a critical, constructive, and real analysis on strategies for the construction of this symbiosis. It is expected to contribute to a reflection on the development of collaboration and cooperation skills in an interdisciplinary, or even transdisciplinary approach, for the training and preparation of fashion design professionals, requiring a greater commitment from Academia in the creation of interactions and interrelationships with still very different disciplinary sectors.

Intercultural design requires designers to work with culturally situated meanings that may change as they are interpreted and materialized through visual form. Yet cultural meaning is often examined through completed artifacts, leaving the intermediate transformations through which cultural references become design material less visible. This study investigates these transformations through a qualitative analysis of eight group-based mascot design projects developed by 27 final-year Graphic Design students in Saudi Arabia for Expo 2030 Riyadh. Cultural mapping, sketches, visual iterations, intermediate proposals, and final outcomes were examined to trace relationships between cultural reference, formal development, and anticipated interpretation. The findings show that cultural references were not simply transferred into visual form but transformed through iterative design decisions, becoming redistributed across structure, surface, gesture, behavior, and relationships between characters. The study proposes situated cultural translation to describe the recursive process through which culturally embedded references are interpreted, negotiated, and materially transformed through designing. The framework provides design researchers and practitioners with an analytical vocabulary for examining how cultural meaning changes through making, supporting more critically informed approaches to intercultural design without assuming universal or controllable interpretation.