Block party: contemporary craft inspired by the art of the tailor

Block Party: contemporary craft inspired by the art of the tailor, is a new touring exhibition from the Crafts Council curated by Lucy Orta - Professor of Art, Fashion and the Environment at London College of Fashion, and renowned visual artist whose own practice fuses fashion, art and architecture. Block Party explores the alchemy of the centuries-old skill of tailoring by presenting work by 15 UK and international artists who push pattern-cutting beyond the fashion garment. The artists Lucy Orta has selected take pattern-cutting as a starting point to produce sculpture, ceramics, textile, moving image and collage. Through experimentation the artists have found new ways to assemble pattern shapes, not to create garments but to manipulate shape to realise new outcomes. Block Party focuses on three themes; Storytelling, Embracing the Future, and Motif and Manipulation. In Storytelling artists use pattern-cutting as a means of expression. Turner Prize-nominated Yinka Shonibare MBE presents a child mannequin, dressed in a historically accurate Victorian outfit crafted from African fabric to reference culture, race and history. Claudia Losi’s 24m whale made of woollen suit fabric was transported around the world to stimulate discussion and storytelling before being deconstructed and transformed into jackets in collaboration with fashion designer Antonio Marras. In Embracing the Future existing pattern-cutting methods are manipulated and challenged through the use of innovative processes and technologies. Simon Thorogood’s patterns are created using digital programmes whilst Philip Delamore of the Fashion Digital Studio at London College of Fashion seeks to apply the latest developments in 3D digital design to the garment making process. In Motif and Manipulation the beauty of the paper pattern block is the visual inspiration. Ceramist Charlotte Hodes directly incorporates these familiar shapes into her ceramics whilst Raw Edges re-appropriate the use of a pattern block by creating a flat paper pattern of a chair which is then filled with expandable foam to create the 3D ‘Tailored Wood Bench’

An experimental study to test a 3D laser Scanner for body measurement and 3D virtual garment design in Fashion education

Artists, scientists, anthropometrists and tailors have accurately measured the human body with traditional tools, such as tape measures, callipers and accumulated visceral experience for centuries. Due to the progressive acceleration in the quality of 3D graphics technology and computer processing power, many product industries that traditionally use 3D software as a 3D design and prototyping tool, are also successfully measuring, customizing and re-engineering the products they design and manufacture through the integrated use of 3D Laser scanning technology. In the changing world of Fashion, 3D graphics technology has at last emerged from the shadows of academic research projects and hit the high streets. 3D body measurement surveys, using mobile 3D laser scanners, have mapped the true shape and body sizes of the UK and USA populations. Virtual fit and 3D visualisation technology has expanded out from the Internet, into the physical world, and is now available for shoppers to visualise made to measure garments. The acceptance of three-dimensional body-scanning and 3D digital design tools into our everyday experiences can be seen as a significant move toward encouraging and developing new, innovative learning and teaching methods in Art & Design education. This paper describes an experimental study into the application of 3D laser scanner technology for use in learning and teaching of undergraduate and postgraduate fashion and textiles design; clothing manufacture, fashion marketing, merchandising and promotion. The study focuses on testing the 3D scanning equipment with a student sample group. The use of the sample group attempts to simulate a range of body shapes, categorised by the traditional standard size chart specification method, currently used to design new fashion collections for high street clothing retail and UK fashion education. The methods applied for evaluation and testing of the 3D laser scanner for body measurement are described, and the results of the initial user experiences are discussed. The study seeks to establish the overall efficiency of 3D scanning technology and investigates the potential value for integration of the 3D Laser scanner with 3D clothing design and construction software. Conclusions provide recommendations on the potential effectiveness of connecting the results of the 3D body measurement study to the fashion curriculu

Learning to Navigate Cloth using Haptics

We present a controller that allows an arm-like manipulator to navigate deformable cloth garments in simulation through the use of haptic information. The main challenge of such a controller is to avoid getting tangled in, tearing or punching through the deforming cloth. Our controller aggregates force information from a number of haptic-sensing spheres all along the manipulator for guidance. Based on haptic forces, each individual sphere updates its target location, and the conflicts that arise between this set of desired positions is resolved by solving an inverse kinematic problem with constraints. Reinforcement learning is used to train the controller for a single haptic-sensing sphere, where a training run is terminated (and thus penalized) when large forces are detected due to contact between the sphere and a simplified model of the cloth. In simulation, we demonstrate successful navigation of a robotic arm through a variety of garments, including an isolated sleeve, a jacket, a shirt, and shorts. Our controller out-performs two baseline controllers: one without haptics and another that was trained based on large forces between the sphere and cloth, but without early termination.Comment: Supplementary video available at https://youtu.be/iHqwZPKVd4A. Related publications http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~karenliu/Robotic_dressing.htm

Collaborative CoVE Projects for Digital Design in FE Teaching and Learning

The Batley School of Art & Design CoVE in Digital Design is a catalyst for collaboration between local schools, colleges and the creative industries. The digital CoVE bridges a regional skills gap in learning and teaching digital imaging technology. The paper discusses two aspects of current FE learning and teaching development. Firstly, the way in which the CoVE digital resource has impacted on the level 2 and 3 student learning experience within the college. Secondly, a case study outlines the fashion and digital textiles design collaboration between London College of Fashion, Chesterfield College and Batley School of Art & Design CoVe’s. The case study provides details of the CoVE project setup and illustrates student and academic experiences during the project

A virtual reality framework for fast dataset creation applied to cloth manipulation with automatic semantic labelling

© 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Teaching complex manipulation skills, such as folding garments, to a bi-manual robot is a very challenging task, which is often tackled through learning from demonstration. The few datasets of garment-folding demonstrations available nowadays to the robotics research community have been either gathered from human demonstrations or generated through simulation. The former have the great difficulty of perceiving both cloth state and human action as well as transferring them to the dynamic control of the robot, while the latter require coding human motion into the simulator in open loop, i.e., without incorporating the visual feedback naturally used by people, resulting in far-from-realistic movements. In this article, we present an accurate dataset of human cloth folding demonstrations. The dataset is collected through our novel virtual reality (VR) framework, based on Unity’s 3D platform and the use of an HTC Vive Pro system. The framework is capable of simulating realistic garments while allowing users to interact with them in real time through handheld controllers. By doing so, and thanks to the immersive experience, our framework permits exploiting human visual feedback in the demonstrations while at the same time getting rid of the difficulties of capturing the state of cloth, thus simplifying data acquisition and resulting in more realistic demonstrations. We create and make public a dataset of cloth manipulation sequences, whose cloth states are semantically labeled in an automatic way by using a novel low-dimensional cloth representation that yields a very good separation between different cloth configurations.The research leading to these results receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) from the European Union Horizon 2020 Programme under grant agreement no. 741930 (CLOTHILDE: CLOTH manIpulation Learning from DEmonstrations) and project SoftEnable (HORIZONCL4-2021-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01-101070600). Authors also received funding from project CHLOE-GRAPH (PID2020-118649RB-I00) funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and COHERENT (PCI2020-120718-2) funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and cofunded by the ”European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The telematic dress: Evolving garments and distributed proprioception in streaming media and fashion performance

Centered around several short films from streaming performances created in 2005, this paper explores new ideas for movement technologies and garment design in an arts and digital research context. The "telematic dress" project, developed at the DAP Lab in Nottingham, involves transdisciplinary intersections between fashion and live performance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies, choreography, and anthropology. The concept on an evolving garment design that is materialized (moved) in live performance originates from DAP Lab's experimentation with telematics and distributed media (http://art.ntu.ac. uk/performance_research/birringer/dap.htm] addressing "connective tissues" through a study of perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing) and the dancer/designer/viewer relationship. This study is conducted as cross-cultural communication with online performance partners in Europe, the US, Brazil and Japan. The inter-active space is predicated on transcultural questions: how does the movement with an evolving design and wearable interactive sensors travel, how does movement - and capturing of movement - allow the design to emerge toward a garment statement, and how are bodies-in-relation-to sensory fabrics affected by the multidimensional kinesthetics of a media-rich, responsive environment