Notations for Knitted Structures

Co-Proposer	Dr Claudia Eckert, Engineering Design Centre, University of Cambridge
Software	(Possibly) Procedural or OO language with GUI tools
Covers	Formal methods for HCI analysis
Skills Required	Knowledge of knitting, interest in formal analysis methods for interfaces and information artefacts
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ??? Programming

Brief Description

The design and manufacture of commercial knitwear involves some of the world's most sophisticated CAD systems, and industrial knitting machines are some of the world's most complex machines, with over 100 000 parts. The most advanced knitting machines make possible an enormous range of knitted structures made up of different kinds of stitches (stitch structures). But the use of more complex and innovative knitted structures is severely limited by the difficulties knitwear designers (who know what they want) have in communicating their ideas for stitch structures to the knitting machine technicians (who use the CAD systems to program the knitting machines, and who understand the capabilities and limitations). One major cause of this bottleneck is that knitwear designers develop their stitch structures by hand knitting pieces of fabric (swatches), and they have no language to communicate them to the knitting machine technicians, who have to reverse engineer the design by analysing the swatches, which is difficult and time consuming to do. This problem could be removed if the designers and technicians shared a formal notation for knitted structures, in which the designers could write down their new stitch structures, so that technicians could see immediately if they were feasible, and if so how to program them.

The core of the project is developing a formal notation for knitted structures tailored to the requirements of machine knitting rather than hand knitting. The proposers see this project as valuable original research, that is potentially publishable, and want to see it done, so they will provide support with understanding the technicalities of machine knitting.

Extensions

Develop a simple CAD tool for specifying and modifying knitted structure descriptions using your notation.

Use formal methods for analysing the information content of computer screen displays and information artefacts to compare different notations for describing knitting patterns. (There are several different ways of expressing patterns for hand knitting, that have very different advantages and limitations.)

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