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The Communication Bottleneck in Knitwear Design:Analysis and Computing SolutionsCLAUDIA ECKERT*

Department of Design and Innovation, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Abstract:

Communication between different members of a design team often posesdifficulties. This paper reports on the results of a detailed empirical study ofcommunication in over twenty British, German and Italian knitwear companies.The knitwear design process is shared by the designers, who plan the visual andtactile appearance of the garments, and the technicians, who have to realise thegarment on a knitting machine. They comprise a typical but small design teamwhose members have different backgrounds and expertise. Knitwear design allowsa detailed analysis of the causes and effects of communication breakdown.Designers specify their designs inaccurately, incompletely and inconsistently;technicians interpret these specifications according to their previous experience ofsimilar designs, and produce garments very different from the designers’ originalintentions. Knitwear is inherently difficult to describe, as no simple and completenotation exists; and the relationship between visual appearance and structure andtechnical properties of knitted fabric is subtle and complex. Designers andtechnicians have different cognitive approaches and are very different people. Atthe same time the interaction between designers and technicians is badly managedin many companies. This paper argues that improving the accuracy and reliabilityof designers’ specifications would significantly enhance the design process. Itconcludes with a description of the architecture of an intelligent automatic designsystem that generates technically correct designs from the designers’ customarynotations.

Keywords:Design, Communication, Team Working, Ethnography, Knitwear, AutomaticDesign, Notation.

* Correspondence Address:EDC, Engineering Department, University of Cambridgecme26@eng.cam.ac.uk

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1 Introduction

The strength of a design team often lies in its diversity, but diversity can also madeteamwork problematic. Every person has a particular personality and works in adifferent way; each brings different expertise and experience to the task. Designerswith different expertise and areas of responsibility can have radically differentconceptions of designs and the activities involved in producing them. Thecommunication of design ideas between different members of a design team is amajor factor influencing any collaborative design process, and communicationbreakdowns can cause severe problems. Computer support for designcommunication can both cause and alleviate communication failure.

This paper presents the results of an ethnographic case study of communicationdifficulties in the knitwear industry, analysing several factors contributing tocommunication breakdown, and discussing the potential for computer support forcollaborative design to alleviate these problems.

Knitwear design is the creation of a technically complex product according toaesthetic considerations – the relationship between the appearance of a knittedstructure and its structural characteristics is subtle and complex. While being animportant industry in its own right, the knitwear industry shares importantcharacteristics with both other aesthetic design industries and engineering design.Knitwear design is shared primarily between the designers, who design the visualand tactile appearance of a garment based on fashion trends and customerrequirements, and the knitwear techniciansi, who are responsible for programmingknitting machines to realise these design ideas. The knitwear design process isessentially linear: the key communication act is the hand-over of designspecifications to a different team member at the same location.

The designers undertake the conceptual design of the garment, which as in otherindustries is usually skeletal, vague and tentative. In developing the knittingmachine programs the technicians work out the detailed design. The shapetechniciansii construct the cutting pattern for the shape of the garment andassemble the sample garments. (In some smaller companies this job is done by thedesigners.) The knitwear design team is small compared with those designingcomplex engineering products, but is typical in different team members havedifferent responsibilities, interests and expertise but their collaboration is essentialfor the success of the product. In knitwear design significant inefficiencies in theprocess can be directly attributed to communication problems.

Teamwork in design and its problems has been studied both by design researchersand within computer science by CSCW and information systems researchers. Alarge part of teamwork research is based on design experiments (for example Kvan

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et al., 1997; Cross and Cross, 1997; Ullman et al., 1997), and addresses tasks thatare undertaken jointly by a team. Other studies employ interviews (for exampleBushby, 1998). Crabtree et al. (1997) analyse problems in collaborative designbased on a survey the participants recording their design activities in quarter hourintervals. Information systems research into teamworking has focussed on theoutcome or the process of collaboration (see Huang and Wei, 1997, for anoverview). Misinterpretation of design specifications in non-concurrent situationsis hidden from the team members, because the recipients are typically notconscious of actively interpreting specifications that could have other meanings,while the senders typically cannot distinguish misinterpretations from subsequentdesign decisions. Thus misinterpretations are unlikely to be discussed in interviews.The relative simplicity of the knitwear design process makes it possible to look agreat number of designs in a range of different companies, and to observe the samedesign at different stages of the design process.

This paper points out the multiplicity and interconnectedness of the factorscontributing to communication problems in design. Some of these are difficulties incommunicating early conceptual designs to be found in any field without preciseand complete notations. Knitted structures are inherently extremely difficult tocommunicate, so knitwear designers face task-specific difficulties. Visualappearance and technical realisation are indivisible. The only accurate model of aknitted fabric is a knitted fabric. An expression of a design without a technicalrealisation is ambiguous, but working out how the fabric could be created isbeyond the designers’ expertise and would upset the division of labour. Designersand technicians think about designs in different terms, in which different aspects ofthe designs are important. Moreover, they are very different people cognitively andculturally. The culture of the knitwear industry hardly recognises thesecommunication difficulties and does little to counteract them.

The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential for technological solution tothe communication problems in the knitwear industry, though computer supportfor creating and communicating knitwear designs. Artificial intelligence techniquesfor automatic design can be used to generate a technically correct starting point fordetail design from a potentially inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistent designspecification.The studyThis research draws on observations in thirteen British, nine German and threeItalian knitwear companies, made over a period of four years. The interactionsranged from one-hour interviews with designers and technicians, to observations ofdesign activities lasting up to one week. The methodology combined ethnographicmethods developed in the social sciences (see Agar, 1980) with knowledgeacquisition techniques from artificial intelligence (see Tunnicliff and Scrivener,1991), in a model-driven approach to analysing the design process (Stacey andEckert, 1998). The study covered a wide range of companies, from suppliers tobottom of the market mail order companies to some of the world’s most

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prestigious knitwear companies. The study placed emphasis on evaluatingassertions from interviews and conclusions from observations by talking todifferent people in the same companies about the same issues, as well as examiningthe same issues in competitor companies.

The author has also worked on acquiring some of the knowledge, skills andperceptions of the designers and technicians herself, by taking pattern cutting anddesign classes at De Montfort University, Leicester, attending knitting machineprogramming courses at Universal GmbH, and by designing garments.

2 Knitwear design

The analysis of the causes of failures of communication in the industrial knitweardesign process presented in this paper forms one part of a detailed analysis of thestructure of the process (Eckert, 1997), which was intended to guide thedevelopment of intelligent support systems for knitwear design (Eckert and Stacey,1995; Eckert et al, 1998, in press). In this section we outline how the interactionbetween knitwear designers and knitwear technicians fits into the whole of thedesign process.

In knitwear the shapes of the garment pieces are designed at the same time as thefabric. The pieces are either knitted in shape (‘fully fashioned knitwear’), or cut outfrom rectangular sheets of fabric (‘cut-and-sew knitwear’); and assembled intocomplete garments in the end. Knitwear design thus combines the scope of fashiondesign, which is concerned with the shape of garments, and textile design, whichcreates fabric with woven or printed patterns. The interplay between shape andfabric is the major source of complexity and difficulty in knitwear design.

2.1 THE KNITWEAR INDUSTRY

The textile industry is one of the world’s major industries and the knitwear industryis a substantial part within it. Western knitwear companies are under constantpressure from competition in the Far East. (In the late 1990s British retailers haveput their suppliers under intense pressure to manufacture abroad to reduce costs.)Like all textile products, knitwear must be designed and produced under tight timepressures. The beginning of a new season in shops sets an unmoveable deadline.Due to the requirements of production and the retail chains’ need to select co-ordinated collections, the design process for a season begins one and a half to twoyears before garments reach the shops.

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2.2 OVERVIEW OF THE KNITWEAR DESIGN PROCESS

The designers begin working on a new season with what they call ‘research’:investigating the coming fashion trends and selecting yarns from which all thegarments in a season are made. They then plan the types of garments they intend tocreate for the season. Most designers begin what they think of as designing bydesigning fabric swatches, though many will already think in terms of completegarments. Swatchesiii are later combined into the designs of garments,supplemented by swatches developed for particular garments. Designers createspecifications (see section 3.2) for each of the designs they want to see turned intosample garments, in the form of a technical sketch ( ), which is the conceptualdesign of a garment describing its shape and appearance.

Start

DesignDesign

SamplingSampling

Modification

DiscardProduction

Acceptance

Modification

Discard

Acceptance

ResearchResearch

yes

no

no

no

no

yes

yes

yes

yes

Figure 1. Basic Stages of the Knitwear Design Process

The technicians then take over the development. The knitwear technicians programthe knitting machine and knit the garment pieces. This involves doing a lot of detaildesign in the course of interpreting the technical sketch in structural terms; thetechnicians often deviate significantly from the designers’ intentions. The shapetechnicians create cutting patterns for the shape, and make up the complete samplegarmentsiv. The knitwear technicians have often already been in involved increating fabric samples to select new yarns and knitting idea swatches for fabrics.

The finished sample garments are selected internally and often also by externalbuyers. Only once a decision has been made to produce a design will it be graded(reproduced in different sizes), and adapted for production when necessary.

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2.3 THE INTERTWINING OF DESIGN AND TECHNICAL REALISATION

Technical and aesthetic design can never be completely separated in knitwear, eventhough the work culture imposes a sharp separation through the division of labourbetween designers and knitwear technicians. A detailed analysis of the influence ofthe technical properties of knitwear on design is far beyond the scope of this paper.The complexity that knitted structures can have can be seen from textbooks onknitwear technology, for example Spencer (1989). In this paper we are onlyconcerned with why the technical properties of knitted fabric make communicatingconceptual designs of garments problematic.

The capabilities of each individual machine limit the space of possible designs; onlypeople who work regularly with a machine know what it can and cannot do. Whatis possible also depends on the type of yarn; for instance mohair is relatively weakand will break if knitted into an elaborate cable, while attempting the same cable instrong but unstretchable cotton will break the needles on the knitting machine.

Figure 2 Lace Wave Pattern

The relationship between the stitches in a piece of knitted fabric and its size andshape depends primarily on the types and combinations of stitches. For simplestitch structures, such as knit and purl patternsv and straightforward multicolourpatterns (fair islevi and intarsiavii patterns), the rows and columns of stitches arestraight, so that relating conceptual design to implementation and predictingappearance from structure is relatively easy. The relationship between structureand appearance is made more complex by cables. Holes (in lace patterns) and othercomplex combinations of stitches cause the size and shape of stitches to vary, sothat the rows and columns are not at all straight. In some lace patterns thearrangement of the holes cause the rows to form undulating waves. In these casesappearance cannot easily be predicted from structure, nor can appropriatestructures easily be derived from an intended appearance. It is also extremelydifficult to predict by looking at a structure how hard it is to realise on a knittingmachine. For example cable (i) in Figure 3 is a standard cable. A designer would be

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strongly discouraged from using cable (ii), because the yarn might break incrossing three strands. The shadow effect of cable (iii) can only be achieved inhand knitting.

Fabric is often designed separately from the shape of the garment, and it is difficult topredict whether the pattern will fit onto a shape. Imagine a Fair Isle overall patternwith a small motif, say a swan, of 10 rows by 25 columns, which needs to beplaced onto a simple set-in sleeve shape. Ideally the swans should not be cut. Thewidth of the garment is however specified to be 105 stitches. What is the bestplacement? Can the garment width be changed?

(i) (ii) (iii)Figure 3. Technical Realisation of CablesTechnically Routine: (i) Standard Arran Pattern; (ii) Difficult Technical Problem: ThreeGroups of Stitches Crossed; (iii) Technically Impossible Problem: Cables withShadows

2.4 COMPUTER SUPPORT FOR KNITWEAR DESIGN

Industrial knitting machines are among the world’s most complex and expensivemachine tools, with around 100 000 parts. The major manufacturers of flatbedknitting machines are Shima Seiki in Japan, and Stoll and Universal in Germany.Knitting machines are controlled by programs for knitting garments that aredeveloped on highly sophisticated CAD systems produced by the knitting machinemanufacturers; the capabilities of the CAD systems are a vital factor in selling theknitting machines themselves. These CAD systems provide visual programmingenvironments in which designers or technicians can create schematic graphicdepictions of garments using symbols or colour codes for different types ofstitches. They use embedded expert systems to support automatic programming ofindustrial knitting machines by compiling their symbolic notations into machineinstructions.

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Despite marketing claims to the contrary, these CAD systems are primarily toolsbuilt by knitting machine manufacturers for knitting machine technicians toprogram knitting machines, rather than as design tools for designers. Using thesesystems requires considerable understanding of the technicalities of knitweardesign. Knitting machine programming is a mental activity quite similar toprogramming in assembler.

Modern CAD systems can generate simulations of knitted structures, but onlywhen the program for knitting a garment or a piece of fabric is fully complete.Either the designers create the designs themselves or they have to communicatethem to the technicians. Simulations provide faster feedback than fabric swatches,but the initial communication problem remains. A designer described this processof simulation as “The Shima [CAD] system can knit the fabric onto paper”.Designers complain that computer simulation does not give the feel of the fabric,and they can visualise the fabric themselves, but praise it for communication andmarketing purposes.

2.5 THE EFFICIENCY OF THE PROCESS

Practitioners do not normally comment on the efficiency of the process as such,unless they speak about improvements that they have achieved. However thedesign process appears to be inefficient by the following indicators:• Ratio of Design Ideas to Samples: Ideas are cheap. Each designer produces

hundreds or even thousands of design ideas in each season, which theyvisualise mentally as garments. Only about 50 to 100 designs are specified astechnical sketches and about a third of these are produced as sample garments.Of the 20 to 40 sample garments, the retail chain buys fewer then 10.

• Technical feasibility of designs: Almost all technicians complain about thedesigners’ lack of technical knowledge. Only about 30% of all the designsspecified as technical sketches can be turned into sample garments than can bemanufactured at the specified price point.

• Time pressure during sampling: All participants in the knitwear design processcomplain about having to work overtime before presentation deadlines. Theyoften have to settle for sub-optimal design or technical realisation becauseiterative improvement is infeasible.

3 The communication bottleneck

The communication between designers and technicians is a major contributingfactor to the inefficiency of the design process, because designers and technicianscan not specify their designs unambiguously, in a culture that does little tocounteract communication difficulties (section 4).

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3.1 MODES OF INTERACTION BETWEEN DESIGNERS ANDTECHNICIANS

In current industrial practice knitwear design is a nearly a linear process (seeFigure 1). Designers and technicians work mainly independently. There is noorganisational provision for joint problem solving, even though some particularindividuals work collaboratively. (The author has encountered one exception,where the design process has been re-engineered along concurrent engineeringprinciples similar to those recommended by Eckert & Demaid (1997).)

In most cases the interaction goes through the following stages (see Figure 4).Designers create their designs on their own. When they have finished most of theirdesigns, they hand them over in the form of technical sketches (Figure 4), whichthe technicians interpret on their own. While the technicians sample the garments,the designers move on to designing for the next season. The technicians createcomplete swatches or garments that get as close as possible to what the techniciansthink the designers wanted, and present them to the designers. Designers areusually only able to comment on the modifications made by the technicians whenthey have produced sample garments. Designers can accept the sampled version orcomment on what they would like different, but there is often no time for iterativerefinement of designs.

Technicians

Continue Process

modify

accept

yes

no

yes

no

Designers

Rejection

Acceptance

ModificationSuggested

Time run out

START

Specification

Impossibilityexplained

SolutionSuggestions

Realisation

Impossibility demonstrated

AbandonDesign

Figure 4. Modes of Feedback between Designers and Technicians

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3.2 SPECIFICATION OF A DESIGN

A garment is officially specified in a technical sketch. A particular designonly enters the system once thisis issued. As illustrates, atechnical sketch includes a briefverbal description of thegarment, in this case “ladies A-line Tunic”, which is the mostreliable part of the specification.It also includes a set ofmeasurements. Designers guessthe measurements based onprevious garments. They areoften an inaccurate description ofthe designers’ idea. Themeasurements are oftenincomplete, because the designersdo not know a measurement orleave it out deliberately as anattempt (not always successful)to initiate a dialog with thetechnicians. The measurementsare also mutually dependent, forexample sleeve length and sleevewidth; and can therefore beinconsistent.

Figure 5 Industrial Example of a Knitwear Specification

The designers produce sketches to illustratetheir design (typically one per technicalsketch), but often complain that thetechnicians ignore their sketches. As section4.1.2 points out, interpreting a sketch isinherently problematic. For example in , thesketch shows one straight sleeve and one thatis narrower at the elbow. The elbowmeasurement is also less than the cuffmeasurement. The technician constructed astraight sleeve. However technicians often donot take information from sketches, even ifthey cannot get it in any other way. For

Figure 6 Raglan Sleeve

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example the exact shape of a raglan sleeve can be seen most easily from a sketch asit requires the intersection between a line and a curve to be specified (see Error!Reference source not found.). Designers sometimes supplement technicalsketches with garments, swatches or photographs of garments. These supplementsare likely to get lost during photocopying.In many companies technical sketches are produced in batches and handed over totechnicians without further explanation, relying on earlier unrecorded discussionsto give the technician a context for each design.

3.3 INTERPRETATION OF SPECIFICATION

Technicians need to interpret these specifications to create samples or swatches.They trust the short verbal description and interpret descriptions accordingly. Theirinterpretation is influenced by the designs that they have produced in the past,which for them are the standard exemplars of categories. For the designers, thestandard meanings of their category terms come from the shapes and features of anemerging fashion. For example designers complain that no matter what raglansleeve they specify, the same sleeve comes back on a sample. With the discrepancyin the seasons designers and technicians are working on (see section 4.4.2) theframes of reference of designers and technicians can be three or four seasons apart.The shape that the designers specify is the final shape of the garment, whereas thecutting patterns that the shape technicians construct is the shape the fabric needs tohave to achieve that shape. From this a complete sample is produced. Designerscannot tell whether their garment designs fail to come out as they had envisionedthem because of inadequacies in their specifications, or because something else hasgone wrong. Therefore they have little chance to improve the quality of the theirspecifications. As designers and technicians get to know each other over years theywill of course get better at understanding each other. Bushby (1998) identifieslack of feedback as a major problem in engineering design.

3.4 MUTUAL DISTRUST AS AN EFFECTS OF THE COMMUNICATIONBOTTLENECK

Designers and technicians are often dissatisfied with each other. Designers arefrustrated that their specifications are ignored, while technicians feel that cannotget designers to give them the information that they need.

Many designers complain that if they specify a new structure, the technicians’initial reaction is “that can not be done”. Later the technician comes back with anentirely satisfactory solution (which may be a significant modification of thedesigners’ original request). Technicians complain that they often have to waste

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time to prove to a designer that a certain design can not be produced, when this isentirely obvious to them from the beginning.

Technicians do not trust the designers’ specifications, because they know fromexperience that the designers often define impossible designs. Several technicianshave quoted 30% as the ratio of designs that are technically possible in a givenyarn on a given machine at a given price point. With some justification techniciansattribute the fact that designers specify impossible designs to their lack of technicalaptitude and knowledge.

4 Reasons for communication breakdown

Differences in responsibilities, interests, expertise, culture and language can beovercome if the participants in a design process have a notation in which to sayexactly what they mean, if the notation is complete, precise, and cost-effective touse. This is the case in some branches of engineering, but knitwear designers andtechnicians are not so fortunate. They do not have any exact model with which tocommunicate a knitted structure short of an actual knitted structure. Therelationship between the combination of stitches in a knitted structure and its size,shape and appearance is subtle, and dependent of the technical properties of theyarn. Information about complex knitted structures is therefore inherently difficultto communicate. However difficulties in communication between designers andtechnicians arise from a number of different factors. Only a complete understandingof all aspects of the problem can inform the design of appropriate computersupport tools and strategies.

Communication of knitwear designs is intrinsically difficult - harder then in othertextile domains. It often depends on sketches, which always allow great scope forinterpretation (see section 4.1). Designers and technicians have different mentalrepresentations and thinking styles. At the same time the pressures of fashion andthe length of the sampling process mean that the designers and technicians in acompany are working on garments for different seasons. The organisation andphysical arrangement of many companies aggravates the problems. In many socialcontexts good personal relations can counterbalance communication difficultiesbetween workers with different interests and expertise, but knitwear designers andtechnicians are very different people who usually have little social contact outsidework.

4.1 EFFORT AND COMMITMENT IN COMMUNICATING CONCEPTUALDESIGNS

In most design domains an accurate description requires a large investment ofeffort in working out details, and so a high degree of commitment to a design

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(Cross, 1989). It is a well known problem in engineering that designers frequentlypick the first plausible solution and work it out in detail, without ever searching foralternatives. This can be attributed partly to the difficulty of specifying designs atthe earliest stages of development exactly enough for them to be evaluated. Inknitwear design the problem is somewhat different. Designers typically producevery large numbers of designs, without putting a great deal of effort into any one.Designers together with managers and sometimes buyers narrow these down to asmall subset for further development, before they seek any kind of technical inputfrom the technicians. The limited investment of effort in describing each designrestricts the ability of the technicians to interpret the designers’ intentions. Animportant problem faced by knitwear technicians is that it is often hard to interpretfrom a sketch, which aspects of a design are specified accurately, and what isdeliberately left vague.

4.1.1 Greater accuracy requires greater commitment

In consequence many designers explore options at the conceptual design stage bygenerating and evaluating mental images, often without any sketching. Aestheticaspects of visual appearance, such as exact shapes of curves, and balance andproportions of colours and design elements, are difficult or impossible to conveyby words, and sketches created as part of idea generation may be unintelligible toanyone else.

A detailed and accurate specification of a design requires committing a significantchunk of the designer’s time to a specific design. By investing this time into aspecific design, designers have to change focus away from conceptual design: inthe case of knitwear designers, thinking about their requirements, their sources ofinspiration, and the demands of fashion. As section 4.2 points out, knitwear doesnot have an intuitive and easy notation for specifying designs accurately. So byworking out a design sufficiently to specify it accurately, with a sketch or in asymbolic notation, the designers have to devote quite a long time, and make amapping between their mental representation and the representation they are usingon screen or on paper. The degree of precision and reliability is proportional toeffort.

4.1.2 Conflict in the intended degree of detail in a sketch.

Sketches are always imprecise and often ambiguous or self-contradictory, andleave scope for interpretation in details. Any communication between individuals,or between humans and machines, that depends on sketches is potentiallyproblematic.

Knitwear designers often use sketches to specify aspects of a design that wouldotherwise be difficult to describe, for example the angle of a raglan sleeve (seesection 3.2). The rest of the sketch of the garment is often just a placeholderproviding the context for the particular aspects that are unusual or important.

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However, the technicians do not know which part of the sketches contains theimportant information, and so should be taken seriously and studied carefully.Designers frequently complain that technicians ignore their sketches, and producethe same designs that they have always produced using category labels andstandard procedures. This can be attributed to the failure of the technicians torecognise the intended degree of detail and precision with which design featuresare depicted in sketches. This is largely due to the conflict in degree of accuracy tobe found both between sketches and within sketches. The problem might bealleviated by explicit indications of how seriously to take different parts of thesketches, but we have never observed anyone trying that approach.

The main function of sketches in the knitwear design process is to communicatethe proportions and balance of pattern elements on the garment. Even thoughtechnicians claim not to make extensive use of sketches they absorb thisinformation from them.

4.2 DESCRIPTIONS OF KNITTED STRUCTURES

None of the ways of representing knitwear used in the industry are at the sametime unambiguous, complete, and easy to read and write. Each possible notation isa compromise and leaves scope for interpretation. In industrial practice designerscommunicate their ideas to technicians in a number of ways.

4.2.1 Typical notations

Swatches and Garments: As far as possible designers use anexample of a certain structure to communicate their designs.This can be a swatch (piece of fabric), which they have boughtor created themselves (often on a hand flat knitting machine,very seldom with knitting needles); or an entire garment.Technicians copy a swatch or aspects of the garment as closelyas they can. Reverse engineering a knitted structure can bedifficult, in exactly the same cases where other notations aredifficult to use or inadequate.

Photographs: If no actual garment is to hand designers often usephotographs from magazines or their own shopping trips toillustrate a fabric. A photograph has much less technicalinformation than an actual garment, and shows few designdetails, but can communicate some of the mood of the design.

Figure 7 Fashion Photograph of a Garment with Lace Pattern (Vogue,December 1996, p. 43; garment by Karl Lagerfeld)

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Sketches and Drawings: Pictorial images stress the emergent properties of thefabric, rather than its structure. For example some lace patterns cause a waveeffect if the holes are arranged suitably on top of each other. This emergentappearance is hard to predict exactly from any structural description. It is alsodifficult to work out the required structure from the desired emergent properties.Sketches indicate the proportions of the design and the balance between itscomponents, but give rise to different interpretations of details (see section 4.1.2).

Colour Coding: Most CAD systems (see section 2.4) use different colours fordifferent types of stitches. However there are more different types of stitches then

there are easily differentiable colours. The colourcoding requires familiarity with the code andsome understanding of the technicalities ofcreating knitted structures. Colour codingcamouflages the original colours ofmulticoloured designs; and makes certain partsof the design more salient than others. Withsuitable familiarity with the codes, colour codingis the fastest and most accurate notation.

Figure 8 Colour Coded Structure (Cable Pattern on the Right)

(Shima Seiki, 1996)

Made Up Notations: Designers oftendescribe a pattern by crosses or noughtson gridded papers. However thesedescriptions are only comprehensible byinference from context.

Figure 9 Make Up Notation

Hand Knitting Notations: Professional knitwear designersdo not use the typical layperson’s hand knittingdescriptions naming or describing stitches in the sequencein which they are hand knitted. The German garmentpattern magazine publisher Burda has published handknitting pattern books using sophisticated graphicnotations in which stitch structures are described as gridsof stitches with symbols for different stitch types. Wehave never encountered designers designing for powermachines in industry using it.

Figure 10 Loop description of part of a cable pattern (Universal, 1996)

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Loop Descriptions: The only complete and accurate notation is a so-called loopdescription, which describes the structure in terms of the how the stitches look ona knitting machine

looking at the needle beds from the top, thus showing the path of the yarn.However this requires technical knowledge to use, is extremely lengthy and doesnot show the final appearance of the fabric.

Verbal Descriptions: Some designers describe theirdesigns verbally to technicians, normally bydescribing modifications from an existing design orby discussing adaptation from a source ofinspiration.

Figure 11 Symbolic Notation for Cable (Burda, 1988)

4.2.2 The only model of a knitted structure is a knitted structure

Model house designs are built from cardboard, model car designs are made inreusable clay, but is not possible to create a mock up of a knitted garment inanother material to communicate the design without creating knitted fabric. Only aswatch can communicate an intended design accurately and give information aboutthe creation process. As the simulation program requires complete knittingmachine instructions (see section 2.4), they do not overcome the problem ofcommunicating design ideas.

4.3 COGNITIVE FACTORS

Mental images are extremely difficult to research or observe, however designers’and technicians’ powers of visualisation are reflected in their attitudes tocommercial simulation software (see section 2.4). Both designers and technicianscan mentally visualise knitted structures and manipulate them. Experienceddesigners have commented to the author that visualisation ability is the mostimportant talent a designer requires. Designers can visualise garments on differentpeople and imagine the drape of garments. Technicians can visualise complexknitting operations, such as the creation of cable patterns. However, the way inwhich both groups visualise designs is different: designers think in terms of visualand sometimes tactile emergent properties whereas technicians think in terms ofthe structural characteristics of fabrics.

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4.3.1 The difficulty of describing mental images

The problem of communicating a mental image of a design to someone else iscomparable to trying to explain a picture over the telephone. Our language canexpress symbols and categories, but is inadequate for the task of describingsubtleties of shape and texture, and can be ambiguous. Even when the explanationis long and detailed, a listener who does not see a picture still only has a partialunderstanding of how it might look like. It is possible to recognise a picture from adescription, but unlikely that a complex picture can be recreated from a verbalaccount no matter how detailed. But this is exactly what needs to happen in thedesign process: the mental model that the designer has of a garment needs to betranslated into a garment by someone else. As a designer has phrased it: “thetechnicians need to knit what the designers think”.

4.3.2 Different mental representations of designs

The designers think primarily in terms of the visual and tactile appearance of thefabric or the garment. They design to achieve an effect. They talk to each otherabout the effects they are trying to create, for example a crochet effect, or anocean wave look. These effects are emergent perceptual properties of the fabric.The designers have to force themselves to think about structural propertiesrequired to achieve the desired effect. They see a design primarily as an overallconcept within the context of fashion, which expresses a pre-decided mood.Designers do not think in abstractions; they think in terms of complete garments orswatches from the time they start looking at yarn and forecasting material. Theyhave the subjective sensation of seeing complete designs as pictures of garments.One should be wary of making assumptions about how much detail and how manydifferent aspects of a design a subjectively complete image includes. Somedesigners see garments in colours, often from their current standard colour palette;others are not initially aware of colours or see black and while colour contrasts,and then colour in their images.

Technicians think about and describe knitwear in terms of the structure of thepattern, as combinations of stitch types, or combinations of machine operations.When technicians are suggesting alterations to a fabric they sometimes try tomaintain the structural characteristics of the fabric and not the visual appearance.For example the author has observed a technician changing a cable pattern fromFigure 12(a) to Figure 12(b), because in the specified design the yarn broke as aresult of crossing two adjacent cables in opposite directions. The visual effect ofthese cables is very different, even though they are structurally very similar. For thetechnicians the emergent properties are the goal of the reasoning process, not thebeginning.

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Figure 12. Different Appearance of Cable Patterns with Similar StructuralProperties (Taken from Burda, 1975)

4.4 ORGANISATIONAL FACTORS

The organisation of the knitwear design process in industry creates communicationdifficulties, some of which could be alleviated by better management (see Eckertand Demaid, 1997).

4.4.1 Getting hold of each other

In many companies the offices of the designers and technicians are quite a longway apart. The technician’s offices are close to the sample machines, which areoften kept close to the production to enable the technicians to attend to productionmachines. Designers often are located elsewhere in a quiet corner of the site, asknitting machines are very noisy. Seeing each other takes effort. When designersand technicians are moved close together designers notice it as a relief. Designersand technicians often have to wait a long time until they can catch up with eachother when they need critical input. For example a technician needs to show anunsuccessful swatch to a designer before trying a different solution. The machine isset up, the program is loaded and two minutes designer time is required. If thetechnician cannot find the designer, he has to begin a new task and think his wayinto a new problem. Designers are often in internal meetings, seeing buyers,customers or yarn sales people, at shows and on shopping trips, and are thereforeout of their offices. In most companies there are fewer technicians then designers,so the designers have to wait until the technicians have finished a task for acolleague. Interaction is very much more efficient and successful in the onecompany the author has visited that has reorganised its design process according toconcurrent engineering principles and located its technicians next to the designers.

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4.4.2 Overlap of seasons - different frames of reference

Designers Technician Production Shops

Design N + 3

Research N + 3 Sampling N + 2

Design N + 3 Design N + 3

Production N + 1

Shop N

Figure 13 Overlap of Seasons

When the designers begin their research for a new season the technicians are busysampling the previous season. Production is two seasons behind the designers’research. As designers and technicians are working on different seasons, they workin a different work context. When problems arise where designers and techniciansrequire the others’ input they are working with different frames of reference andinterpret assertions accordingly. Designers would like to concentrate fully on theresearch on the new seasons and are primarily interested in the new work, but theyare often interrupted to sort out problems of the previous season. They spend moretime troubleshooting the previous season then researching the new season, but notin an organised manner. Both designers and technicians are involved in solvingproblems that arise in production. The problems created by the overlap of seasonsare increased by last minute adjustments to seasons for buyer presentations, whichrequire new designs or modifications to existing designs. Both groups require eachother’s support at a time when it is not convenient to the other group. This leads toinefficiency and frustration.

4.5 CULTURAL FACTORS

Knitwear designers and technicians have very little expertise in common, and havea very different outlook on life.

4.5.1 No overlapping expertise

Designers don’t receive much technical training in the construction of knittedstructures or programming CAD systems during knitwear design courses atcollege. Universities cannot afford the hardware to give each student adequateaccess to a CAD system or a power knitting machine, and the manufacturers donot offer educational licences for their CAD software. Many designers are trainedin fashion or textile design and are not taught knitwear in depth. In industry onlyvery few designers are trained to program power machines, rather than just how toenter colour designs. Designers acquire technical knowledge piecemeal throughpractical experience of seeing how their designs are realised. This knowledge is not

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systematically passed on to younger colleagues. Many technicians have commentedto the author that they would like their designers to have greater technicalknowledge; they think that better technical training for designers would be thesingle thing that would improve the design process the most.

Technicians do most of the detailed design of knitted garments when they aretranslating the designers’ rough specifications into fabric or shapes. Techniciansdon’t have design training. They rarely have an interest in fashion and don’t followdesign developments. Only one company the author has visited takes techniciansalong to fashion and yarn shows; it proved beneficial to them. With practicetechnicians learn design principles, such as balance of pattern elements or colours.They adapt to company house styles and learn to fit into the design style ofindividual designers.

4.5.2 Record keeping

The only record of the design process is a technical sketch, such as that shown in .Most designers initially produce sketches for their designs, which they tend not tokeep; and do not show to the technicians. If the designer and the technician discussa design it happens in unrecorded conversation in an informal situation.

Knitwear companies don’t keep many records of previous designs. Somecompanies keep all finished sample garments, others only sold garments or selecteddesigns. The technical specifications are kept for one or two years and are thenthrown out. Successful swatches are seldom kept in any organised manner, andswatches of previous versions of fabrics are not kept. Theme and mood boards arerecycled after the end of the season. The records are kept in the memory of theparticipants. Yet designers and technicians frequently use old designs to describenew designs in terms of changes from them, and copy measurements from olddesigns or technical sketches. New designers have to put significant effort intolearning the house style. This is highly problematic as many designers don’t stay ina job for more than three years, because they are afraid of burning out and canoften only change their career through changing jobs.

The lack of design records has also been identified by Scaife et al. (1994) as amajor problem in other parts of the textile industry.

4.5.3 View of creativity

In both universities and industry the view is held by some people that excessivetechnical knowledge restricts the designers’ creativity. There is some justificationfor this view, as technically experienced designers tend to design to the ability ofthe machine, rather then push it to its limits by demanding novel designs. Withincreasing expertise designers learn successful design components which theyinclude in new designs as a way of working quickly under time pressure. Howeverthere is no evidence that the creativity as such is restricted, rather that designers

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have found ways to design feasible designs fast. (See Eckert and Stacey, 1994, fora fuller discussion of attitudes to creativity in the knitwear industry).

4.5.4 Different social groups

Three main participants share the knitwear design process: the designers, the fabrictechnicians and shape technicians. They are very different people in most respects,who do not naturally interact. Designers are young university or polytechniceducated women with artistic aspirations in a job that is not highly paid. Almost alltechnicians are men, who see themselves as working class and have little interest infashion or other artistic occupations. They are typically recruited from knittingmachine operators, and have no education beyond secondary school, even thoughthe job is as challenging as other types of computer programming. They are betterpaid than designers, which contributes to their generally much higher jobsatisfaction. Technicians are hard to replace and stay for a long time in the samecompany. Designers and technicians rarely socialise. They do not discuss problemsin casual chat and generally do not know each other well enough to understandhow the other group thinks.

Eckert and Stacey (1994) present a more detailed analysis of the gender and otherdifferences between designers and technicians, and their differences in aptitude andaccess to computer technology. There are exceptions to this pattern, includingcompanies where designers and technicians socialise. Since that paper was written,we have encountered a young female knitwear technician, who said she did notsuffer from sex discrimination.

4.5.5 Skill Profile of Design Managers

Only in the last few years have knitwear companies included designers in themanagement of a company by creating the job of design manager. The othermanagers tend to be male and have degrees in textile technology or businessstudies, or have neither a degree nor any training in textiles. They cannot assesstechnical arguments and often only have a partial understanding of fashion.Therefore they cannot mediate between designers and technicians.

4.5.6 Power struggles between the designers and the technicians

Most companies declare that they are committed to realising the designers’garments as closely as possible, because the design ultimately sells the garments.However they rarely give the designer formal power over the design process. It isdifficult to find skilled technicians, because few people able to program highlycomplex CAD system are to be found operating knitting machines on the shopfloor. Colleges and universities produce a surplus of designers, and designers findit difficult to get a job. Companies don’t have problems recruiting skilled designers,but sometimes find it difficult to find designers with management skills. Thisdifference in job security gives the technicians power over the designers who know

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that if they antagonise the technicians, they are likely to leave and not thetechnicians.

4.6 SOME INTERNATIONAL DIFFERENCES

The analysis presented in this paper applies equally to knitwear design in Britainand Germany. However there are some differences between these countriesresulting from their different training patterns and labour costs. In Britain mostknitwear designers are trained at least to some extent in knitwear design and knowat least in principle how to operate a knitting machine. They are interested in theconstruction of knitted garments and often express great regret that they don’thave the time to learn more about the technical side of knitting. On the other handGermany does not have specific knitwear design degrees and most Germanknitwear designers do not know about the technical side of knitting; nor do theyconsider it their job. In consequence German designers often reuse stitch structuresfrom other designs or from swatches that they buy. This is compensated by thebetter theoretical understanding of the German knitwear technicians, resulting froma high standard of a training comprising three-year apprenticeships – often at theknitting machine manufacturers’ headquarters - and a year of professional training.In Britain knitting machine technicians are recruited from the shop floor andtrained in a company for a particular CAD system.

Due to high salary levels and strict legislation on issues like overtime many Germancompanies have moved their production abroad and only kept a samplingdepartment in Germany. In recent years some companies have also closed downtheir sampling departments and sample at their suppliers. If the designers andtechnicians are no longer in the same company and do not speak the same languagethe need for accurate written specification increases.

The Italian knitwear industry has on the whole a different division of labour. Italydoes not have specific knitwear design degrees, and many knitwear companies hireBritish knitwear graduates as fulltime or freelance designers. Knitting machineprograms are often developed in dedicated software houses that specialise inprogramming knitwear machines of all kinds. Top range German companies usethese Italian software houses and Italian manufacturers in spite of high labour costsin Italy, because they are most able to push the capabilities of machines to theirextremes.

5 The role of computers in overcoming the communication bottleneck

Computers have already played a significant role in easing the communicationdifficulties by facilitating office communication and providing consistentrepresentations of knitted structures. But they still have major limitations as

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support for conceptual design, because designers find it difficult and timeconsuming to translate their ideas into forms the systems can use, even if they havethe expertise to do so. However a CAD system that turns the designers’ currentlyincomplete and inaccurate specification into a clear representation of their ideascould break this bottleneck.

5.1 EXISTING COMPUTER SUPPORT FOR DESIGN COMMUNICATION

So far the main contribution by commercial CAD systems to facilitating designcommunication has been to make the creation and specification of colour patternssignificantly easier, so that designers could define their own Jacquards. Designsthat were a matter of weeks twenty years ago are now a matter of hours. If thedesigners are willing to invest the necessary time and effort these designs arecommunicated precisely. For more complex designs designers would have toacquire the skills of the technicians to program the machines. This would upset thedivision of tasks in the industry; and would increase the workload of the designers.

Technicians now spend much less time on the programming of simple designs.However the basic work pattern has remained the same. Technicians havecommented that their workload has remained the same over the years, because thedesigns have become more complex as computer technology has madeprogramming easier. The increased level of technical complexity of the designsmakes efficient communication more important than ever before.

5.2 INTELLIGENT SUPPORT THROUGH SOLUTION SUGGESTIONS

The experience of communication in design teams in many fields of engineeringshows us that communication difficulties can be minimised by notations andcomputer tools that enable designers to say precisely what they mean in a cost-effective manner. As section 3.2 argues, many knitwear design specifications areincomplete, inaccurate and inconsistent, because designers do not have the time ortechnical knowledge to express their ideas accurately; moreover many designs areinfeasible at their intended price point. In order to create coherent and feasibledesigns, designers need technical feedback during the idea generation process. ACAD system should allow designers to specify tentative designs quickly andreceive fast initial feedback, so that they can then explore the space of feasibledesigns. This approach has been introduced in fashion information systems, such asthe Gerber system (Gerber, 1996), where designers can specify a design throughmodifications to older designs and receive initial costing feedback. Doing this for aknitted garment is far more complex than a woven garment, because its feasibilityand cost depend on details of the stitch structures and the placement of designelements on the shape. Feedback entirely based on descriptions of modifications to

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a previous design would not be enough, considering the idiosyncrasies of thematerial and the decisions required for each design.

The communication problem can partially be overcome by a computer system thatcan turn a tentative and potentially incompletely specified design into a technicallycorrect version which could be understood by a technician. Eckert (1997; Eckertand Stacey, 1995; Eckert et al, 1998, in press) proposes a system to createconceptual designs of garments automatically from designers’ customaryspecifications. These suggestions can be evaluated visually and edited by thedesigners while maintaining internal consistency. The design that the knitweardesigners pass on to the technicians corresponds to the designers’ intentions, istechnically correct and complete; and can be presented in multiple representations.

Traditionally garment shapes are constructed in industry using a manual craftapproach. To create automatic solution suggestions the construction of garmentshapes needs to be modelled mathematically. The model needs to enable thedesign support system to meet the following requirements:• design starts from the specification of shape categories and measurements, or

from shape categories and default values;• designs are easy to edit both by direct manipulation of diagram elements and by

changing measurement values, so that users can modify the solutionsuggestions;

• the system highlights and modifies inconsistent input measurements;• the system allows easy use of the intelligent completion of values;• the system maintains domain constraints;the system is adaptable to individual company styles.

IntelligentCompletion of Values

MathematicalModel

incomplete inconsistent inaccurate

Specification

consistent

complete

accurate

Designers

current

visual feedback

Technicians

CAD System

proposed

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Figure 14 Overcoming the Communication Problems for Garment Shapesthrough a Mathematical Model as part of an Intelligent CAD System

To fit into the designers’ customary working practices and thinking style, garmentshapes need to be presented as two-dimensional outlines as in the technicalsketches, so that the proportions are easily visible. This can be translated intocutting patterns for individual shapes, which is often a better representation forediting details, as well as into a set of measurements. These shapes represent thefinal shape of the garment independent of fabric properties. They could be used bytechnicians as a starting point to create the final cutting pattern or the shape of thegarment piece for a specific fabric. Figure 15 shows a prototype systems.

Designers are used to receiving suggestions for designs, because technicianspresent them with completed implementations of their conceptual designs after aconsiderable time delay. Professional designers are highly skilled in evaluating theirown and other designs on a variety of aesthetic and technical criteria, byperceptually appreciating the characteristics of design, more than by reasoningabout them (Schön, 1983; Schön and Wiggins, 1992). This enables them toFigure 15 Prototype System

recognise good or technically correct designs, even if they could not create them.Presenting possible designs visually exploits the designers’ highly developed skillsin the perceptual evaluation of designs.

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6 Conclusion

In knitwear design aesthetic design is inseparable from technical realisation (seesection 2.2). Neither designers nor technicians understand both aspects of design,which limits what they can imagine as well as what they can do (see section 4.5.1).The full potential of the medium can therefore rarely be explored. We haveobserved that difficulties in communication between designers and technicians arejointly caused by a variety of different factors, and have a number of significantinfluences on the design process.

6.1 EFFECTS OF THE COMMUNICATION DIFFICULTIES ON DESIGNCREATIVITY

The results produced by the knitwear design process are significantly influenced bythe difficulties designers and technicians experience in communicating with eachother.• If a designer fails to communicate a new idea successfully, it does not get

produced.• Communication difficulties cost designers time which they otherwise could

spend on developing new ideas. Many designers spend less than ten percent oftheir time on developing new ideas, and the rest of their time on getting ideasrealised as samples and sold.

• As a result of the lack of technical feedback designers devote much of theeffort they put into new designs on designs that are infeasible at their intendedprice point.

• Knitwear design does not have a notation that enables designers to expressdesign ideas easily and fluently (section 4.2.1) without solving technicalimplementation problems for which designers don’t have the expertise (section4.5.1). So the most efficient way to specify a new is design is by reference toan existing one (see section 4.2.2). Only a few companies in the world have thetechnical expertise and can afford the time investment to create new structurepatterns. In consequence reuse of old designs and copying from other garmentsis a necessity in design communication.

• Most design specifications are ambiguous and require interpretation.Interpretation is always based on an individual’s personal expertise andexperience (see section 4.5.1). Designers create new design ideas that areembedded in context of other new designs based on the trends that they seecoming through. Technicians, who are not involved in design research,interpret what they see in terms of what they have seen before, namely theirown garments from previous seasons. In knitwear this results in a gap of atleast four seasons between the referential contexts of designers and technicians(see section 4.4.2). This contributes strongly to a standardisation of designs

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across seasons, so that new designs are not as innovative as their designersintend them to be.

6.2 RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF THE REASONS FORCOMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

The difficulty of expressing conceptual ideas in knitwear is at the heart of thecommunication problem. As there is no complete and accurate representation of acomplex knitted structure other than a knitted structure (and reverse engineering aswatch is not a trivial task), communicating a design with the precision andaccuracy needed to avoid confusion is very time-consuming, and designers areusually under pressure to produce a lot of designs quickly.

The ambiguity and imprecision inherent in most of the means of expressing designsmeans that they require interpretation. The interpretation is likely to differ from theoriginal idea, if the recipient’s frame of reference differs from that of the sender.Knitwear designers succeed better in expressing their ideas to their peers, becausethey share very similar frames of reference: an awareness of the envelope ofacceptable designs in the current fashion, and the cultural connotations of garmentswithin that envelope, as well as awareness of the currently central meanings ofcategory labels. Technicians lack this common understanding, with the result thattheir interpretations of verbal descriptions and sketches is biased towards their ownframes of reference, which come from the garments they have developedthemselves previously.

The culture of the knitwear industry does very little to create a commonunderstanding. Designers are not taught to program knitting machines andtechnicians don’t take part in fashion research. Moreover, misunderstandings areviewed as incompetence or unwillingness. Facilitating frequent easy interaction canhelp, as designers and technicians become more familiar with each other’s workand tasks.

Even though knitwear designers and technicians come from extremely differentsocial groups (section 4.5.4) this is not the cause of the communication problem,but merely a factor in the lack of compensation for the communication problemsinherent in the division of labour in knitwear design. If designers and technicianscame from more similar groups they would be more likely to socialise and talkabout their work; thus addressing problems as they arise in an informal manner.Common interests, and similar backgrounds and ages would give the two groups agreater shared understanding of cultural references, such as fashion trends orinspiration material.

The most fundamental problem is, however, that the industry in general does notrecognise that a communication problem exists, and therefore does nothing to

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counteract it. In the few companies that have seen the problem, designers andtechnicians have actively worked on finding a shared language, for example bydefining a common vocabulary for cables. Once a communication problem isidentified, each group can put effort into finding ways to clarify their ideas as muchas possible, and develop a mechanism of interaction through frequent meetings oran intermediary person.

6.3 COMPUTER SUPPORT TECHNIQUES

Computer support can alleviate communication problems in design in twofundamentally different ways: (1) by enabling the different team members to reachboth each other and their reference materials and design documentation moreeasily, while maintaining and supporting the existing modes of communication; and(2) by disambiguating the design specifications. Artificial intelligence techniquesfor automatic design can be used for generating complete and correct designspecifications. Designers can explore the design space by inspecting designcompletions based on vague or incomplete specifications; they can then use anautomatically generated design as a starting point for modification. The systemassures that the designs that are evolved from the automatically generated versionsare consistent and technically correct when they are handed over to the technicians.This enables the designers to specify what they want at a predicable level ofaccuracy. When different members of a design team can trust each other’sassertions, they can more easily gain respect for each other and work moreharmoniously.AcknowledgementsClaudia Eckert’s research has been supported by SERC ACME grant GR/J 40331for the knitwear project at the University of Loughborough Department ofComputer Studies; by ESRC grant L12730100173 for the MIND project at theOpen University Computing Department; and by Open University ResearchDevelopment Fund grant 717 at the Open University Department of Design andInnovation. The author is deeply indebted to her PhD supervisors, Prof. NigelCross and Dr. Jeff Johnson of the Department of Design and Innovation at TheOpen University, and Dr. Helmut Bez at the Loughborough University Departmentof Computer Studies. This paper has greatly benefited from conversations andcomments on previous drafts by Dr Martin Stacey of the Department of Computerand Information Sciences, De Montfort University, Milton Keynes.

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i Normally referred to as “technicians”. The term is changed to highlight the similarities with the

shape technicians.

ii Normally referred to as “pattern cutters” or “make up people”. Both terms are ambiguous, as

pattern cutter also is used for the person who cuts garment pieces in production; and make up

person also refers to somebody who only assembles the garment in production.

iii Swatches are little samples of possible fabrics for garments, with new motifs and stitch

structures.

iv Prototypes

v Knit stitches are the standard stitches that make up most or all of most knitted garments; single

jersey fabric consisting only of knit stitches is very common, for instance as T-shirt material.

Purl stitches are ‘back-to-front’ knit stitches.

vi Two colour pattern

vii Intarsia patterns comprise regions of fabric knitted with different yarns.