Knitwear customisation as repeated redesign

Producing large numbers of garment variants will only be economically viable if it requires very little human effort. But garment customisation cannot always be fully automated. Applying grading rules maintain the same details but sometimes achieves a different overall effect; but the customer expects the same overall effect and is less concerned about details. Choosing between alternative customisations requires a human designer's trained perceptual judgement. Therefore a viable mass customisation support system must support the repeated redesign of a garment by combining automatic design with fast human editing. Evaluating and modifying the suggestions of others is a natural and efficient activity for designers. This paper describes two prototype automatic design systems exploring techniques that could be used for mass customisation of knitted garments – in which the shape and patterns are indivisibly linked. An early pattern placing system that automatically altered both shape and pattern parameters in a variety of alternative ways. A shape design system that generates technically correct and consistent garment shapes from a set of measurements and a verbal description; it works independently of sizes, recalculating the shape for each new set of measurements. Starting from the system's suggestions, designers can very quickly tweak the new design to fulfil their aesthetic intentions

The long road to improvement in modelling & managing engineering processes (MMEP)

Managing complex engineering design processes is a challenge for industry, which is looking to academia to provide tools and methods to support them. The Modelling and Managing of Engineering Processes Special Interest Group of the Design Society aims to support industry in understanding, modelling and running design processes by bringing together a community of design researchers and interacting with industry by identifying research challenges and working together to resolve them. This paper maps out research challenges for MMEP and reflects over some of the challenges we have as a research community in meeting these ambitious goals. This paper begins by presenting an ambitious research roadmap developed in 2008 and then compares the roadmap with the research topics that current members of the MMEP SIG are working on before reflecting on how and where we have made progress and what would be serious progress in this area. Based on the analyses of research topics and progress, the paper concludes with a discussion of the evolution of research topics and associated challenges for design research, and sketches measures required for improving our efficacy as a research community

References to past designs

Designing by adaptation is almost invariably a dominantambiguity feature of designing, and references to past designs are ubiquitous in design discourse. Object references serve as indices into designers' stocks of design concepts, in which memories for concrete embodiments and exemplars are tightly bound to solution principles. Thinking and talking by reference to past designs serves as a way to reduce the overwhelming complexity of complex design tasks by enabling designers to use parsimonious mental representations to which details can be added as needed. However object references can be ambiguous, and import more of the past design than is intended or may be desirable

Ambiguity is a double-edged sword: similarity references in communication

Designers often explain new concepts and new ideas by reference to existing designs. This is parsimonious, as it only requires a pointer to the referent and a description of the modifications. Such descriptions can be extremely powerful, expressing the entire context of a design or a process in a few words. However similarity assertions are inherently ambiguous, because they depend not only on the chosen description but also on the intention behind the similarity comparison. In this paper we attempt to analyse the effect that the ambiguity of similarity references has on communication and idea generation in design. The reinterpretation of a similarity assertion can be extremely creative, where ambiguity allows for new interpretations of a problem. At the same time, it can make accurate communication extremely difficult because every assertion can be interpreted differently unless the context is fully shared

Engineering design in a different way: cognitive perspective on the contact and channel model approach

Engineering design often involves the integration of new design ideas into existing products, requiring designers to think simultaneously about abstract properties and functions as well as concrete solution constraints. Often designers struggle to reason with functional descriptions, while not fixating on existing solutions. This paper introduces the Contact & Channel Model (C&CM) approach, which combines abstract functional models of technical systems with the concrete geometric descriptions that many designers are familiar with. By locating functions at working surface pairs, they receive a concrete location in mental models. The C&CM approach can be applied to analyze existing product descriptions and synthesize creative new solutions for parts of the system or for entire new systems. At the moment the approach is being developed into an complete modeling and problem solving approach. C&CM has been used for several years in undergraduate engineering teaching at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) and is increasingly being introduced into industry by its use in research and development projects, by its students and its alumni

Trends and Design Relating literature to industry practice

In a crowded market place, where technology and functionality are not enough to differentiate a product from its competitors, the product’s appearance is a major driver of consumer preference. But preferences change over time, and product forms need to reflect this in order to stay relevant. This paper addresses the usage of trends by designers to inform the design and evolution of their products. Published theory regarding trends in product form exists in the fashion and consumer behaviour domains, but not in direct relation to the design of consumer products. This paper is preceded by a synthesis of literature in adjacent fields and compares the literature understanding with real industrial practice. Interviews with 9 professionals in trend research, design consultancy, furniture, fashion and architecture, were undertaken to explore the value and usage of trends across a variety of creative fields. The interview data were used to corroborate and enhance the literature understanding. In addition, the study also provides some emerging comparisons between design disciplines. The product designers interviewed were unlikely to use formal trend research methods: inspiration, tacit knowledge and experience accounts for much of their creative output. However, trend consultancies have developed methods of identifying and using trends to develop products for 5-10 years in the future. The fashion industry also has established ways of to rapidly identify or predict trend information. Keywords: Product form; trends; fashion; foresight</p

That which is not form: the practical challenges in using functional concepts in design

Functional modelling is a very significant part of many different well known design methodologies. This paper investigates the questions of what functional modelling approaches people use in industry and how they conceptualize functions. Using interviews and the findings from an experiment where 20 individual designers were asked to generate a functional model of a product, the paper highlights the different notions designers associate with the word function. Difficulties associated with functional modelling arise from varied and inconsistent notions of functions as well as wider challenges associated with modelling and the introduction of methods in industry

Intelligent support for knitwear design

Communication between different members of a design team often poses difficulties. The knitwear design process is shared by the designers, who plan the visual and tactile appearance of the garments, and the technicians, who have to realise the garment on a knitting machine and assemble it. This thesis reports a detailed empirical study of over' twenty companies in Britain and Germany, which shows that the communication problem constitutes a major bottleneck. Designers specify their designs inaccurately, incompletely and inconsistently; the technicians interpret these specifications according to their previous experience of similar designs, and produce garments very different from the designers' original intention. Knitwear is inherently difficult to describe, as no simple and complete notation exists for knitted structures; and the relationship between visual appearance and structure and technical properties of knitted fabric is subtle and complex. At the same time the interaction between designers and technicians is badly managed in many companies. This thesis argues that this communication bottleneck can be overcome by enabling designers to produce accurate specifications of technically correct designs, through the help. of an intelligent computer support system that corrects inconsistent input and proposes design suggestions that the user can edit. In this thesis this proposal is elaborated for one aspect of knitwear design: garment shape construction. Garment shapes are modelled using Bezier curves generated using design heuristics drawn from industrial practice, to create curves that look right to a designer and can be easily edited. The development of the garment shape models presented in this thesis involved the solution of unusual problems in numerical analysis. The thesis shows how the mathematical models can be integrated into an intelligent CAD system, and discusses die benefits of such a system could have for the design process