9. Conclusions

The different jobs and roles in the knitwear industry are segregated by sex to a remarkable degree; moreover the complex technology used in the industry, including CAD systems, is controlled entirely by an almost exclusively male group, the knitting machine technicians, while an almost exclusively female group, the knitwear designers, is excluded from mastery and control of the technology. This is in striking contrast to other design domains, such as architecture and textile design, where CAD systems supporting designers already play a major role. In this paper we have tried to explain this, and tried to explore the question of what would be involved in giving knitwear designers mastery over the CAD systems.

While we do not think prejudice against women doing technical jobs has died out in the knitwear industry, our observations lead us to believe that the sharp division of males and females by role is an orthogonal issue to the pattern of computer usage in the industry. While we have not studied the issue extensively, the evidence we have is that knitting machine technician is a male trade for the same social reasons that mechanical jobs in other industries have been male, while knitwear designers are female because of the distribution of interest in an activity perceived as very feminine, and the social pressures influencing boys and girls in their choice of career.

We conclude that the major determinant of the pattern of computer use in the knitwear industry is the fundamental importance (and difficulty) of programming knitting machines, which has always been the province of the knitting machine technicians. The knitting machine manufacturers need to provide ways to program their machines, and the quality of the programming environments they provide is a critical area of competition between them. Supporting designers has simply never been essential. An important secondary determinant has been the availability of relatively well worked out technology for computer controlled manufacture and for programming environments; providing good computer support for designers is a harder problem that is far from fully solved. The economics of the knitwear industry is another significant secondary determinant. The existing CAD systems are very expensive, so that knitwear companies cannot afford to buy more than the minimum number they can get away with. At the same time few companies can afford to invest resources in training the designers on CAD systems when they cannot see a clear benefit and expect the designer to leave after only a few years.

We have found a widespread belief (not shared by designers in industry or by the technicians they work with) that designers do not need any understanding of the CAD systems or knitting machines, and are likely to be harmed by it. We conclude that while this does not cause the sharp division in CAD system usage, it contributes to the lack of interest on the part of machine builders in producing designer-friendly CAD systems for the future, and the lack of support and encouragement given to designers to master the existing CAD systems. The view that familiarity with a CAD system can actively harm a designer has some element of truth, but we conclude that it is outweighed by the advantages of being able to use CAD systems, and hypothesise that the negative effects can be combatted by education and by gaining full mastery of the system. The fallacious view that systematic problem solving is opposed and hostile to creativity contributes to these attitudes; we conjecture that similar views might appear and exert a harmful influence in other industries, if the development of CAD technology leads to an integration of the activities of designers and engineers.

We conclude that the strong prima facie case that the efficiency of the knitwear design process could be improved by giving knitwear designers access and competence with CAD systems for knitwear, resulting in cheaper or better garments, is in fact supported by the evidence available to us, though it remains untested. But achieving this improvement would require CAD systems cheap enough for much more extensive use, and designers who emerge from their degree courses already well trained in how to use them. This in turn would require much greater emphasis on CAD systems in knitwear design courses.

Further improvement in the position of knitwear designers and in the efficiency of the design process will depend on the development of CAD systems better suited to the needs of knitwear designers. Efforts are being made to develop such systems, not least by ourselves, but whether they will be used to their full potential will depend on how affordable they are, and on how well design students are taught to use them.

Acknowledgements

This research was partly funded by the ACME Directorate of the SERC, grant number GR/J40331. Prof Ernest Edmonds, Dr Thomas Green, Monica Jandrisits, Wendy Nicholson and Dr Alison Green made helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Our research also benefited from conversations with Bryan Murray. We are very grateful to all our informants for the time and effort they devoted to talking to us, especially Monica Jandrisits and Annabelle Duncan.