Expertise and Creativity in Knitwear Design

MARTIN STACEY

Department of Computer and Information Sciences, De Montfort University, Milton Keynes, UK.

CLAUDIA ECKERT

Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

JENNIFER WILEY

Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago IL 60607, USA.

International Journal of New Product Development and Innovation Management
volume 4 number 1, 49-64 (March/April 2002)

Abstract. As commercial knitwear designers gain experience, many appear to lose their creativity. They often find they have gone stale, and need to change jobs to find fresh challenges. But although designer burnout is a significant phenomenon, experienced designers gain both a broader understanding of their design context and thus a more sophisticated understanding of design problems, and develop expertise in creating the designs their companies require quickly and efficiently. However they may find it harder to create innovative designs. Partly as a result of widespread fallacious beliefs about creativity being antithetical to rational problem solving, experienced designers are not encouraged to develop sufficiently flexible skills, and the skills they do develop are undervalued. This paper relates the demands that knitwear designers face to the cognitive psychology of learning and expertise, to examine what designers learn from experience, and how the demands that govern their designing behaviour can be altered to enable them to develop their ability to innovate as well as design efficiently.

Keywords: Expertise, creativity, psychology of design, knitwear, fashion.

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