Sources of inspiration in industrial practice:
The case of knitwear design
Sources of inspiration in industrial practice:
The case of knitwear design
Engineering Design Centre, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
School of Computing, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
Journal of Design Research volume 3 (2003)
FROM THE CONCLUSIONS. Knitwear designers make extensive, explicit and systematic use of sources of inspiration throughout their designing activities, to understand the scope of fashion, in planning their design work, and in the design of individual garments. Compared with designers in other industries, knitwear designers are very aware and open about their adaptations, very broad in their choice of sources, and very specific and concrete in the ways they think about them. Knitwear designers’ use of sources of inspiration differs remarkably little between companies and individuals; the variation is between individual designs. In knitwear design, finding and choosing appropriate sources of inspiration is a crucial part of the creative process. A knitwear designer’s most essential skills are, first, using other garments and other sources of inspiration to tune perceptual evaluations of designs; and second, choosing effective sources to adapt. In many cases the process of actually transforming a source of inspiration into a design is a much less significant part of creating the new design. We have found that it is possible to study creative design thinking by examining the strategies designers use to guide and control their idea generation actions so that they produce the kinds of results the designers need. Strategies for finding sources of inspiration, both for formulating design problems and for adaptation into individual designs that meet the designers’ requirements and constraints, are an important part of knitwear designers’ knowledge. Designers’ strategic knowledge includes ways to formulate different types of goals for source searches; these change systematically in the course of designing for each season. ... We present a revision of the classical cyclic view of design – reformulate the problem, change the design, evaluate the change, reformulate the problem – that gives due importance to source selection.
KEYWORDS. Sources of inspiration, communication, design cognition, teamwork, fashion, knitwear.
DOI. 10.1504/JDR.2003.009826
Author addresses. | |
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Claudia Eckert
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Martin Stacey
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